Prosper
by Quinnquerer
Summary: Janet Prosper doesn't have a dream. She has an AMBITION. And she'll move mountains and beat down legends before she gives up on it, mark these words. (A coming-of-age story about a novice trainer and her adventures in the Zan region. Features swearing and violence. Updates on Mondays and Thursdays.)
1. Getting Started

The day opened with a tremendous shriek. With a gigantic grin, I slammed my hand down on my vintage dodrio alarm clock as soon as it struck half-past five. I was already awake, of course, and in fact I had just spent the last thirty minutes sitting on top of my sheets, in the darkness of the dormitory room, glasses on, watching the minute hand on my clock slowly work its way towards the six as _I_ worked my way through a box of Aggranola bars. My packing had been completed several hours ago, and I'd showered and gotten dressed as everybody else was going to sleep. I'd spent the rest of the night poring over the many options for starter pokémon that we were going to choose from today, especially my top ten list and all of their weaknesses and strong points and evolutionary forms.

"Ugh," groaned Stacy Mallard from underneath her pillow, once my alarm clock had stopped ringing. "What the hell are you doing." She wasn't awake enough to apply inflections.

"Wakey wakey," I snapped at my roommates. They were good enough girls, they just needed a little bit of a push sometimes.

I heard someone fumbling with something behind me, and turned to find Diana Stamp looking groggily at her own, digital, clock. "It's five thirty." She yawned. "Go back to sleep." She replaced her clock and burrowed her head into her own pillow.

"What?" I demanded. "What?"

Stacy gave a muffled sigh. "Sleep."

I leapt to my feet- enough was enough. "Guys, we are on the _brink_ of fulfilling our dreams of becoming pokémon trainers. In just- _five_ hours, we're all going to have our own pokémon."

From the corner, Claudia Song gave an uninterested grunt, which Stacy echoed.

"Are you guys even listening to what I'm saying?" I demanded.

"Five hours," said Nadia Pierce. "Just... be cool, okay?"

Aghast, I watched the four of them settle back into their beds. It was like they didn't even care about this, the consummation of all our hopes and dreams. I silently resigned myself to waiting out the next few hours.

Three seconds later, my restlessness became much too much to bear. I bounced to the door and yanked hard on the handle- but it was locked. Right. Curfew measures were only lifted at six in the morning, in time for any members of the school cross-country team who lived in the dorms (like me) to get out and do some early morning running. For obvious reasons, today's early morning run had been cancelled.

I thought for another three seconds, then went over to the window. Like the door, it would be locked. But unlike the door, I knew that there was a subtly hidden keyhole on its left side. I reached into my jacket pockets and pulled out a hairpin. As I always did whenever I took it out, I devoted a few seconds to admiring the sculpted donphan ivory that it was made of, and the ironwrought emblem of a Pokéball wreathed in vines that topped it. Absentmindedly, I adjusted my glasses. Then I turned back to the lock and jammed my hairpin into it.

Now, this was the first time that I'd ever tried to pick a lock, not counting the time that I figured out that you could crack a combination padlock by spinning all of the wheels on it at slightly different intervals while attempting to pull it open, but how hard could it be?

I wiggled the hairpin around a little, and thought some more about the journey that I was on the brink of beginning. The best place for me to head to would be Peppertown, which was widely known as the home of the most beginner-friendly gym in the region. There _was_ a gym here in Allspice, but our leader was a real competitive type- it would be easier if I faced her with a full team designed to counter her setup. The only way I'd realistically be able to face her right at the start would be if I got my dream starter, magnemite. I could picture it now: Mila sending out her swanna with a triumphant shout, only to roll her eyes when I unleashed my third-favourite pokémon ever on her.

* * *

I was snapped out of my meditations when, for the second time that day, Stacy asked me, "What the hell are you doing?"

"Ah," I said smugly. "You decided to wake up after all. Only took you, what, fifteen minutes?"

Stacy looked at me strangely.

"It's been three hours," said Nadia from the doorway.

I looked out the window that I'd been staring at for (allegedly) the last three hours. A cloudless blue sky looked cheerily back at me. Embarrassed, I straightened up abruptly- and then recoiled from the window as what felt like a white-hot bite cut into my arm. I glanced down at it and found myself clutching half of my hairpin. The other half remained embedded in the window. Its jagged end pointed mockingly at me. I must have snapped it when I got up, making something in the window's locking mechanism electrocute me. With some effort, I managed to force my fist open and release the hairpin piece still in it, then (giving the window a wide berth) I returned to my corner of the room and slung my already packed bag over my shoulder. Then I pulled an empty item capsule (the only one I owned) out of my pocket and pointed it at the clock on my bed. It 'accidentally' absorbed my blanket and bedsheets too, but the other girls weren't about to tell. Their beds were as bare as mine now was, and that sure as hell wasn't the work of the school's cleaning machoke.

"About time," I grunted.

Nadia made a noise that sound suspiciously like choked laughter. I shoved her out of the way of the door and turned the handle. With an obliging _click_ , it swung open, and then I set out. My destination? The school baseball field, which was less a baseball field and more a battleground for the older local trainers, and had been that way for about as long as I could remember. Who had time for baseball when there were pokémon to battle with?

I was the first one there, as per usual, and I'd reached my favourite seat, right at the top of the bleachers, when the first few trainers started filtering into view. I recognized Kayda (owner of a magnetron and not much else), a set of twins I'd always just called 'The Twins' (they both ran small teams comprised of a bunch of local species- lame things like raticates and pidoves), and a guy I liked to call Birdbrain (because he only ever used flying types). There were a couple of new faces too- a redheaded girl with a ninetales and some fat guy with a swalot. I wondered what these people were doing here, until it occurred to me that they were probably coming for the graduation ceremony. Allspice Academy was kind of a big deal, after all. It made sense that some out-of-towners were hanging around school.

I spent an enjoyable hour or so watching ninetales lady crush both the twins and Kayda, and decided that she was definitely Champion material. She'd just started on the swalot guy (who I hadn't been paying attention to at all) when Nadia's nasal voice broke into my lovely day.

"Earth to Janet," she said.

"What?" I said.

"Professor Cypress wants to see us," she told me. "I don't know why, but we think it's bound to be something stupid you did."

"What for?"

Exasperated, she looked skywards for a couple of seconds. "I just said: I don't know."

I sighed and got to my feet. "It was just getting to the good part, too."

"Boo-freaking-hoo," Nadia muttered.

Like I usually did whenever she, or anyone else in our year, said something sarcastic to me, I planted my hand on her chest to give her a rough shove. But then it occurred to me that we were standing on the top step of a tall set of bleachers, without any railings for Nadia to hang on to if she were to stumble and fall. I felt a chill run down my spine.

Half a second later, I noticed that I still had my hand on her boob. To save face, I turned the awkward position into an intimidating physical statement by grabbing her by the front of her shirt and hauling her towards me. I couldn't quite lift her off her feet and shake her around (even though she was easily a head shorter than me), so I settled for saying, "Let's go."

Nadia stared at me, her mouth slightly ajar. "What?" she asked stupidly.

"Let's go," I repeated. "It's important, right?"

Sure enough, when we walked back into the main building, the neutral voice of the intercom system was repeating a terse message every few seconds. "Students of Ward Group 11D, please report to the staff room immediately." Year 11, Dormitory D; that was us. I thought back to the events of the last week. What had transpired to make this dumbness happen today, of all days?

We stomped up the stairs at the front of the building and did just that. Claudia, Stacy and Diana were already there, waiting for us. Behind them loomed the needle-thin and steel-stern Professor Cypress. As always, a clipboard lay in his wizened old hands.

He didn't beat around a bush. Despite his spidery appearance, Cypress was as blunt as you got. "Some of the technicians have reported a security breach at the window in your dormitory. Unlike the breach that boys had last year, this came from _inside_ the room. It happened at about half past five in the morning. Who did it?"

"Well, Professor," I started, looking around at the other girls and silently willing them to shut up so that I could come up with a convincing story. Maybe the situation would be salvageable if I put the blame onto Kayda's magneton somehow.

The other four girls immediately pointed at me.

"Ah," said Cypress with a thoughtful frown.

"Yeah," I finished lamely. Not even the best liar in the world could wring a victory out of that.

"You four may go now," he said, waving away the other girls. "Get ready for the ceremony."

Once they'd left, heading off in the direction of our soon-to-be vacated room, Cypress turned to me.

"Janet. Come with me." He set off in the direction of the administrative block, cutting a brisk pace that I matched. I'd always liked how quickly he went over the course material in our Pokémon Physiology classes, and it looked like he brought the philosophy into other activities as well.

As we went past dozens of numbered pink classroom doors, and the sanitary white-green of the wall panelling that divided them, I gave the school at large a final, secret grin. Today was the day that it would all end... and the day that my journey would finally begin.

When we got to the door of the administrative block (a flashy, futuristic affair covered in blinking lights and a key card receptor rather than a lock), Cypress halted and looked up and down the corridor, confirming that it was totally deserted beyond the two of us. Then he sighed and rubbed his temples.

"Is there a problem, Professor?" I asked politely.

Cypress made a noise that I couldn't quite place at first- but then, with a start, I realized it was a snort. "Problem's one word for it," he said, and the edges of his lips curled up ever so slightly. Then they fell back into the thin line of his usual stoic manner. "Janet, I'm going to be straight with you. That stunt with the window... the higher-ups are extremely nervous about breaches of security like that. Their _first_ thought was to hold you back. That is to say, make you start your journey next year."

My blood ran cold. "What?" I said, barely able to keep a tremor out of my voice. It- it was just a stupid window. Who even cared about people trying to get _out_ of the dorms? And anyway, I hadn't even managed to get through the lock to open that window.

He shook his head, as if to dispel the flurry of frantic thoughts inside my head. "I was able to convince them to change their minds. That said, I hope that this helps you understand how seriously the administration takes offences of this kind. Not that it will matter to you any longer, as of noon today."

I nodded, still shaken.

"Anyway. As you still need to be disciplined in some way-" I inhaled sharply. "- you'll be taken off the priority listing." That got a relieved sigh out of me. While it meant that my top-percentage mark in Battle Theory wouldn't translate into the immediate advantage of being one of the first to select a starter pokémon at today's graduation ceremony, it was much better than not getting to pick a pokémon at all. Besides, it wasn't like I needed to have a particularly good pokémon to begin with. With my formidable battling instincts, I'd rise from the chaff no matter what.

"In fact," continued Cypress, "you won't be choosing a pokémon at all."

For the second time in two minutes, I froze. "What?"

"I offered to assign you a pokémon, instead of letting you choose. They agreed on the condition that I take it from my personal collection, so that I wouldn't unwittingly deprive another student of their first choice." A rare grin spread on to his face as he produced a simple, red-and-white Pokéball. "She's mixed-breed and in very good health."

It took me a moment to realize that the pokémon he was talking about and holding right in front of me was about to become my partner in battle for the entire rest of my life. "What is it?"

He held it out to me wordlessly. I felt my jaw go slack. Reverently, I took the Pokéball out of his hand with both of my own.

"Go," I whispered, pointing the ball at the floor some distance away. I placed my finger on the release switch. It yielded, and the ball opened to release a flood of brilliant red light.

When the light coalesced, I regarded my new partner with a trainer's eye. The first thing, of course, were its impressive jaws. They easily made up a third of the body weight of an average member of the species, and this specimen was no exception. In fact, the only real difference I could see was its skin- a somewhat duller shade of orange than its pure-bred brethren, and mottled with darker and lighter patches that almost looked like imprints of leaves.

Otherwise, my new trapinch looked exactly as I expected trapinch to look. I was glad; the looks of a pure-bred flygon were to die for, and when this little guy evolved I wanted it to look more like the rest of its kind rather than less. Awkwardly, I knelt down next to it and ran my hand over the top of its head. It felt strangely earthy, like putting my hand on soil. Trapinch wasn't on the top ten list of starters that I'd drafted in preparation for today, but it could evolve into a _dragon_ -type. That counted for a lot, in my book.

"I expect that you'll do some research into her kind this evening," Cypress said. "The Leafcutter trapinch: consider it a homework assignment."

I groaned and rolled my eyes, but quickly straightened up when I remembered that he'd just single-handedly saved my training career. "Um, thanks, professor. I really appreciate you looking out for me like that."

Cypress adjusted his glasses. "Just remember that you're on your own from here on out, Prosper. I won't be able to intercede on your behalf if you get into trouble in another city." I nodded firmly, to show him that the message had been duly received. "Now get to the main hall. Your graduation won't be for another two hours, but you ought to take this time to say goodbye to a few of your friends."

He pulled out his key card and slotted it into the receptor behind him, opening the door into the administrative block. "I'll see you there," he said.

I waved him off and recalled my trapinch. Then, as per the professor's orders, I headed in the direction of the school's main hall, where the graduation ceremony would take place.

As I turned a corner, though, I realized that I was standing outside the main building's only computer lab. A computer lab meant one thing: access to the Internet. I glanced down at the pokéball in my hand for half a second before I made my choice. It wouldn't take _too_ long to get the basics on the species, or look up video guides for the first twenty or so moves that my trapinch would be able to learn, or search for pictures of Leafcutter vibrava or flygon, or-

"Hey," said a woman's voice. A white-skinned hand swept between me and the article on flygon's standing in the current tournament meta on my screen. Scowling, I looked up, only to find a complete stranger. She towered over me- even if I'd been standing, I suspected that she'd still have a head up on me. Her narrow nose and high, freckled cheekbones struck me as familiar, somehow. It took me a moment to place her as the redhead who I'd seen battling this morning.

"Oh! Hello," I said, swivelling around on my chair to give her my undivided attention once I'd made the connection. "What're you doing here?"

She raised an eyebrow. "You're a student here, right? Mind helping me get into these machines?" She gestured at a computer at the far side of the room. It looked like she'd been trying to log into a computer here for a while now, judging by the fact that several computers to the right of it were bluescreened.

"Sure," I said, getting up.

"Thanks," said the woman, who on closer inspection was probably only three or so years older than me.

I gave the digital clock at the bottom of my own computer a nonchalant glance and abruptly reconsidered. I didn't have time to fix a bloody computer. "Actually, uh, take this one," I said, offering her the seat I'd just been sitting in.  
She seemed a little taken aback, but sat in it all the same. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah, yeah, I've gotta be somewhere else anyway."

"Oh," she said. "The... graduation, right?"

"Uh-huh," I said, even as I fumbled with the door knob. I had about five minutes to get to the hall, which was about five minutes less than I needed.

She said something else that I didn't quite catch, mostly because she said it just as I managed to force the door open. I shot through the doorway at a sprint, hung a sharp left and then ran down the stairs at the end of the hallway two at a time.

Thankfully, the halls were deserted. All the teachers and students had to be in the main hall by now, waiting for the last few stragglers to filter in.

* * *

"You're late," observed Mrs. Graves, the grey-haired and brick-shaped teacher of Pokemon Biology that I had known for most of my life as my case worker. Why fate had saddled me with a lady who looked like she was constantly eating something uncomfortably sour was a question that I hadn't been able to answer yet, but in the mean time she was accosting me just outside the school's main hall.

"Yeah," I said.

To my surprise, she glanced back over her shoulder and held the door open. "Hurry up, it's already started."

I hesitated. "Aren't you going to, like... tell me that I should be more responsible with my time and stuff?"

"Are you telling me that I ought to?" she asked sternly, cutting into my soul with a glare that could cow a rampaging articuno.

"Uh, no, ma'am," I said quickly.

"Then get in here," she snapped. I did as she said.

Inside the hall, the last few rows of seats were totally empty, like they usually were at whole school events like these. I perched myself at the very end of the very last row, and attentively watched as, one by one, my classmates trooped up to a desktop computer on the stage and selected a starter from the database. Naturally, their every move on that computer was projected on the lightscreen mirror that covered the entire back wall of the hall, showing us every single option that each student hovered over- and their final choice. Right now, Stacey Mallard was taking her sweet time. She seemed stuck between horsea and some weird green blob pokémon that I didn't recognise. I grumbled internally. The choice was obvious: the only pokémon that _I_ didn't know were fundamentally useless.

After what felt like a year, Stacey finally decided on the green blob. It vanished from the screen, and the computer spat a Pokéball at her. Until this time next year, no other student at this school would be able to select another member of that species as their starter. I guessed the measure gave us some variety, especially since we were all going to be fortifying our teams with pokémon from the same few places for at least a few days. It suddenly occurred to me that there could very well be a trapinch in the school system, and I spent a few minutes scanning the lightscreen to make sure that there weren't.

Even when I couldn't find any, I didn't let my guard down. Flygon were pretty popular, as semi-exotic dragons with applications in both competitive battles and contests. If there had been a trapinch there earlier, it could easily have been picked right at the beginning of the selection process, by one of the priority students. I racked my brain for the identities of the other four priority pickers (who I would've been sitting next to right now if I hadn't already gotten a trapinch of my very own), but this quickly proved futile. Even if I knew what their names or faces were, I didn't remember talking to any of them enough to learn which pokémon they were hoping to start with.

It didn't matter, anyway. I planned to destroy all of them in time, or at least the ones that made it to the Ruby Conference in ten months. I wasn't about to let a measly flygon get in between me and that goal.

The selection process ended when some loser boy who I didn't recognize was forced to choose between a pidove, a weedle and a wurmple, the sole remaining options after the rest of the year had finished with the list. It could have been worse, I mused, if I'd gone up there. He could have been forced to choose between only _two_ of those trash-tier starters.

He walked slowly down from the stage with his 'prize', a pidove, and the school headmaster, Mr. Lyvin, took his place amid a polite round of applause.

"Greetings, Allspice Academy!" he said, with a salute that he probably thought looked smart. "And welcome, Year Eleven, to the world of pokémon training!"

I groaned out loud. This had all the makings of another hour-long waffle-fest.

"Momentarily, all thirty-seven of you will come back up to this stage and receive two things! Does anybody care to guess what those two things are?"

If there had been kricketot in this hall, even they wouldn't have chirped in the dead silence that followed.

When Mr. Lyvin, after a pause that had stretched long past 'awkward' and was well into 'positively cringeworthy', finally spoke again, he seemed to have lost some of the spring in his step. "Well... item number one is your Pokédex, a crate of which have been graciously donated to us by the North Zan Trainer Act." Scattered applause. "And item number two is, well, your trainer license! That license will let you challenge the eight pokémon gyms of the official Zan League Circuit as you please, and of course can be presented as necessary to allow you to redeem the Battle Points that you accumulate over your travels!"

He coughed slightly. "With that, I'll take no more of your time!" A dusclops holding a cardboard box phased into existence on his right, and without missing a beat he withdrew an oblong, red object from it. "Can Amanda Black please come up to the front?"

Amanda Black. The only person in my year whose name I'd bothered to remember, outside of my dormitory mates (whose names were more something that I'd been _forced_ to learn, through years of exposure, rather than something that I'd memorised voluntarily). She was the one person in the year who had managed to score higher than me in the written exams, and in doing so managed to secure a higher overall grade than me. She was the first place to my second place, and that was something worth remembering.

"Janet Prosper!" I shot to my feet and began the long walk up to the front of the hall, ignoring the curious stares of students who were probably wondering why I was sitting in the back. As I stiffly accepted my own Pokédex from Mr. Lyvin and pressed my thumbprint into the indicated scanner in order to register myself as a trainer, I glanced sidelong at Amanda. Her face betrayed no emotion or recognition whatsoever as she looked out at the audience. Silently, I resolved to challenge her to a battle as soon as we got out of this hall.


	2. Getting Social

"Amanda Black!" I declared as soon as we stepped through the doorway, holding out my Pokéball in front of me. "I challenge you to a pokémon battle!"

She quirked an eyebrow. "What?"

"You heard me," I said.

A boy and another girl, both in our year judging by the lone Pokéballs clipped onto their belts, extracted themselves from the mass of people streaming through the door behind us and took positions either side of Amanda. "What's going on?" said the boy.

Amanda shrugged. "Listen, I'm kind of hungry? We were stuck in that hall for ages, even if you were off god knows where, so how about we-"

I broke her off by extending an Aggranola bar into her face. "Eat now. While we walk to the baseball pitch."

"I..., uh, okay?" She accepted the bar and, after exchanging looks with her friends, unwrapped it and took a bite. Together, the four of us- me, Amanda, and her two friends- cut a path for the baseball pitch (which, again, was never used for baseball).

"So, what pokémon did you pick?" said the boy in a painfully obvious attempt to give his friend an advantage over me. "I thought you weren't even in the line. That's what Stacey said."

I studiously ignored him.

The other girl spoke up. "No, she just said that Janet was gonna be late. Cypress was talking to you, right?" That second remark was directed at me. "What'd he say?"

"It was nothing," I said. They didn't need any more detail than that.

Amanda looked like she was about to take a break from eating the energy bar I'd given her and say something, but I gave her a pointed look. She shrugged and kept on eating it.

Just as I'd intended, Amanda finished the bar just as we arrived at our improvised battlefield, and the two of us took positions at two adjacent baseball diamonds. We pulled our Pokéballs out simultaneously.

Like I'd seen in the TV shows, I gave everyone a quick rundown of the rules. "This will be a one-on-one pokémon battle! Withdrawal equals forfeit, and we battle until one side is unable to battle! We start on the count of three!"

Amanda nodded, as calm as Enger's Lake on a sunny day.

Good. I wanted a rival who could keep up with me. I began the countdown. "Three!"

The two other kids were transfixed.

"Two!"

Subtly, Amanda raised the ball in her hand. I did the same.

"One! Go, Trapinch!"

My trapinch appeared a few metres in front of me in a flash of red light, blinking owlishly. In front of it stood a brutish-looking larvitar.

I whistled. That first pick Amanda had won hadn't gone to waste at all.

"Trapinch!" I snapped. "Bite!"

It responded instantly, lunging forwards with its formidable jaws and clamping them down on the nearest part of Amanda's larvitar- its face. I grinned.

"Good job! Keep holding on!"

Suddenly, it let go. The larvitar skittered backwards with a tiny snarl.

Trapinch looked back at me. "Tra?"

"What?"

While the two of us were distracted, larvitar launched a counter-attack, striking with a Bite of its own. With such a small set of jaws, though, it barely fazed Trapinch. I shooked my head and went back to what worked. "Bite!"

Trapinch automatically unhinged its jaws and struck again, just as the larvitar was withdrawing from its own attack. This time, it got hold of the larvitar's arm.

"Alright!"

"Bite," said Amanda, still looking rather uninterested in the whole affair. Her larvitar bit down on the top of my trapinch's head, clearly hoping that it was a sensitive spot.

It wasn't. Trapinch stood obliviously as the larvitar gnawed on it, awaiting my next order.

"Bite again!"

With almost mechanical efficiency, Trapinch released the larvitar, causing it to stumble backwards, and then lunged forwards again. This time, those impressive jaws closed on the larvitar's foot.

Then, all of a sudden, a red beam of light hit the larvitar, pulling it back into its Pokéball.

I blinked.

"What are you doing?" I demanded. My trapinch looked around for its foe for a couple of seconds, but soon made a satisfied noise and curled its stumpy orange-brown legs underneath its body.

Amanda shrunk her Pokéball and stuffed it in her pocket. "I'm forfeiting," she said. "Dolph obviously can't beat your trapinch, and I'd get bored watching him get gnawed on for thirty or so minutes before he gets knocked out. So... yeah." Her friends skipped over to her and, without another glance at me, they walked off, heading into the city proper.

My only consolation was a small ding from my Pokédex, before it proudly announced to me that I had been awarded 14 Battle Points for winning a 'simple battle'.

Feeling more than a little stupid, I pressed the return button on my trapinch's pokéball and looked broodingly out through the fence that surrounded the school grounds. It was a bright summer's day. Perfect weather for a beginner trainer about to begin a trek through the rainforest that separated Allspice City from the rest of the Zan region. But that battle... had been a little disappointing.

I frowned and shoved the ball back into my pocket. Whatever, I thought. I would just have train my trapinch some more, and hope that Amanda would do the same with her larvitar. The battles would get better when my trapinch evolved and started learning really cool moves, like Fire Blast or Hyper Beam.

Remembering that Amanda had referred to her Larvitar by a name- Doof or something- I pulled out my Pokédex and opened up my 'party' menu. It was empty, but a pop-up appeared to tell me that the dex had detected one unregistered Pokéball on my person, and offered to register it under my trainer account. I accepted the offer, and shortly a rectangle containing a digital icon of my trapinch appeared on the screen, occupying about a sixth of its area. A green bar at the bottom of the rectangle gave me an indication of my pokémon's current physical condition; as I'd expected, it was practically full, even after the larvitar's two pathetic Bite attacks. Next to the bar was a pink circle on top of a cross- so my trapinch was a girl. Huh.

I tapped on the trapinch icon to bring up a more detailed account of her statistics and physiology. Apparently, she knew Bite (obviously), and Bide, and Sand-Attack... and something called Bug Bite. I didn't recognize the attack from any of my course material or videos of League battles, but it apparently projected some kind of energy that destroyed berries and granted the user the benefits of eating them, even if it didn't make contact with any berry at all. I hadn't seen Bug Bite on the official list of natural moves back when I'd looked up trapinch and flygon in the school computer lab, so maybe it was something to do with being a 'Leafcutter' trapinch.

Before I could get too carried away and forget what I was doing, I tapped on the 'nickname' field at the very top of the detailed overview, opening a dialogue box that asked me to say the pokémon's new nickname out loud.

"Caligula," I said carefully, after giving it a bit of thought. You couldn't change a pokémon's nickname after giving it one without going through all kinds of legal channels.

CALIGULA appeared on the screen in front of me, along with a second dialogue box asking me to confirm the name. I tapped on the green tick on the left.

I grinned and pulled out my Pokéball. "Go, Caligula!" With any luck, my trapinch would answer to that name from now on.

"Tra!" it- she- burbled.

"Let's go!" I told it, and set off, looking back over my shoulder to make sure she was following me.

After about five seconds I realized that her stumpy legs weren't really going to let her keep up with me, even if she was pretty fast in a fight, so I bent over and attempted to pick her up.

* * *

"Uh," said a male's voice from behind me, some time later. "Do you want a hand?"

I rubbed my sweaty hands on my tracksuit pants and, breathing heavily, turned to size up the newcomer. Between his mousy brown hair and rounded body, he looked vaguely familiar. "Have I seen you before?" I asked him brusquely.

He looked over his shoulder, and then seemed to realize that I was talking to him. "Oh!" he said. "Um, no, probably not."

We stood there awkwardly for a while. "Are you a trainer?" I said.

"Yeah," he answered.

"Do you... want to battle me?"

He glanced at my trapinch, who was starting to make a weird purring noise. "Sure," he said, not sounding entirely convinced. He pulled a blue-topped Pokéball out of his pocket and expanded it with a tap. A Great Ball? I wasn't expecting that from such an unassuming-looking guy.

"Felix, go," he said.

"Caligula! Bug Bite!" I shouted, pointing at the where his pokémon was coalescing into existence before I even got a good look at his choice.

My trapinch loyally leapt to her little feet and zeroed in on our new enemy, a wurmple. Bug Bite wouldn't have much of an effect on that, but hopefully it would look cool.

"String Shot to slow it down," said the guy trainer.

A white, sticky mesh of fibres erupted from the wurmple's mouthparts and attached itself to the top of Caligula's huge mouth, but didn't actually achieve anything of substance. If it had hit Caligula's legs, it might have tripped her up, but instead...

"Alright!" Caligula's jaws glowed for a second and then made contact with the wurmple, punching into the bug's burgundy exoskeleton with ease. I pumped my fist into the air. "Now Bite!"

Like it had in its last attack on the larvitar, Caligula momentarily detached itself from its foe and then struck out again, tearing even further into the wurmple's body.

"Good work! Now let go!" Caligula looked back at me with the wurmple still in its- _her_ mouth, hesitating slightly, but then let its jaw fall open, sending the wurmple crashing to the ground, unconscious.

"Oh, wow," said the guy. "Your trapinch did a number on the little guy." Without any fanfare, he withdrew his wurmple. "Good battle," he said, extending his hand out to me.

I took it and shook it, then recalled Caligula. Things were looking good for me. I hadn't even been registered as a trainer for an hour and I was already on a two-win streak.

"Say," he said. "You're a student here, right? Would you happen to know the way to-" he glanced at the palm of his hand, which I guessed he'd written the name of the place on- "the 'McDodrio's opposite A. Academy'?"

"A. Academy is Allspice Academy. That's this school," I said.

"Oh."

"So. That McDodrio's is opposite this school. It's right outside. Across the road." I pointed through the south fence, at a road that was currently packed with the lunch hour rush. "That road."

He looked deflated for some reason.

"Have a nice, uh, whatever," I said, to be nice.

The corner of his mouth twitched upwards in a poor approximation of a smile. "Thanks."

"No problem," I said. Then I headed off to the main school building, ready to head out in to the wide, wild world, without giving him another thought.

Food sounded good, but I didn't have the money necessary for an actual fast food place like McDodrio's. Luckily, the minds behind the North Zan Trainer Act had anticipated this, and put together a solution for all the plucky teenage trainers that their ordnance had unleashed upon the nation. As long as you had any number of Battle Points or badges attached to your trainer card, you (and your pokémon) could eat for free at any official pokémon centre in the region. Obviously, pokémon centres had the right to turn away anybody that was causing trouble or eating more than their fair share (or, as Ms. Ivining told us had once happened, attempting to sate a snorlax), but it would be easy not to fall foul of _that_. The rules were simple: no battling, no cutting in line, and no releasing a pokémon that was taller than seven feet tall indoors.

I swept into the Allspice City pokémon centre with style, and headed straight for the food court. I'd visited it enough times, both on school trips and not, to know where everything was off by heart. At the door, I pressed my Pokédex's thumbprint scanner to a receptor above a keypad at the side of the door, and grinned as it obligingly slid open.

The food court looked pretty much exactly as I remembered it. Pastel pink and cream tiles on the walls and floor, a plain white ceiling, and fluorescent lights that kept the whole thing brightly lit. Trainers crowded around plastic tabletops, sitting on benches fixed to the floor that were made out of the same stuff as the tables. The gentle murmur of general conversation suffused the room. I grabbed a tray from a stack near the door and picked up a couple of tasty-looking morsels; rice covered in a healthy portion of beef, and a bowl of spinach (for fibre!). It occurred to me that Caligula ought to have a meal too, especially since she'd just won (technically) two battles. As I was drawing a mental blank on what trapinch were supposed to eat, I tentatively held onto my now-loaded tray with a single hand as, with the other, I extracted my Pokédex. Then, using my thumb alone, I typed 'trapinch diet' into the device's search bar.

Apparently, they were pretty much completely omnivorous, with a preference for vegetables, so I picked up another bowl of spinach. There were a lot of those still sitting out in the open, untouched by the other trainers- in fact, now that I looked, that was the case for most of the vegetable options. I rolled my eyes. Most people couldn't handle eating their greens without their mum or a teacher watching over them, huh?

With my food in tow, I managed to find a relatively empty table, home to only one other trainer- and he was fast asleep with his head in his arms, or looked like it, anyway. I released Caligula, managing to aim the beam so that she ended up on the table rather than next to it (I wasn't going to be able to lift her up for a while), and passed her a bowl of spinach.

"Tuck in," I told her. Although I was beginning to get the feeling that she couldn't understand anything besides direct commands to attack, the meaning of getting offered a bowl of food was pretty much universal. I watched her sink her head into the bowl in front of her, gobbling down the spinach in record time.

"Is that a trapinch?" asked the trainer who had been sleeping at the other end of the table, making me realize that they were actually just a girl with really short hair. Besides that, the only notable thing about her was the cluster of earrings that hung from her left ear.

"Yes?" I asked rather than said.

She seemed to want me to elaborate, so I added, "Her name's Caligula."

The girl nodded pensively. "Cool. Hey, where do you come from?"

"Here," I said. "Allspice City."

"I thought so. You look like a greenhorn."

That didn't sound flattering at all. "What's that supposed to mean?" I asked, my eyes narrowing.

"Uh, nothing," she said, seeming to understand that she'd made a mistake. "Sorry."

"Apology accepted."

Caligula sat on the table without really contributing anything to the discussion.

"So..." she said. "You wouldn't happen to know where that trapinch _came_ from, would you?"

I thought about it for a second. "An egg, right? Because we learn that in-"

She interrupted me with a sigh. "No, like,- by the way, what's your name?"

It took me a moment to register the change in subject and understand what she was asking me. "Janet," I said.

"I'm Carla," she told me. "Anyway, as I was saying, like, Janet, who's the breeder who got you that? Do you know? It looks like a cross, but whoever did it must have been crazy good for it to-"

"Why're you asking? Don't you have a Pokédex?" I said, feeling defensive for some reason.

"Well, yeah, but the nearest trapinch breeders that I have listed are in bloody Allo," she said. "I want to have an affordable shipping fee, thank you very much, if I have one at all."

I considered this. "Oh. Well, Caligula came from one of my teachers. At school."

"They wouldn't happen to be a certified breeder?"

"No. I mean, maybe? But I don't think so. He doesn't like breeders." I wondered if Pokémon Professors technically counted as breeders for legal purposes, but didn't mention it.

"Aw," she said. "I can't work with that." Then, right in front of me, she went back to sleep.

I finished my meal pretty quickly, but I was still a little hungry, so I told Caligula to stay put while I went to refill my bowl.

When I returned, tray laden with another serving of beef and rice, my table had been occupied by a pair of blond-haired trainers who were cooing over my trapinch.

Conscious of the rules against fighting inside the pokémon centre, I tapped rather than punched one of them on the shoulder. "What are you two doing."

They turned towards me and, smiling guilelessly, rose to their full height.

I stared. The two of them were easily seven feet tall themselves.

"We really like your trapinch," said the man, his grin not slipping an inch in the face of my confusion or my suspicion.

The woman nodded enthusiastically.

"Okay," I said slowly.

"We're from Peppertown," he added, still wearing his pleasant smile. His... sister? Girlfriend? Whatever she was to him, she nodded again.

"Is she... can she talk?" I asked.

Seemingly unperturbed by the invasive personal question, the man shook his head. "No, she's not mute. Just deaf!"

Suddenly, he reached out to his left and grabbed the shoulder of another guy who was walking past us. "Hey, have you seen this trapinch?" he said.

Instead of reacting like a rational person and walking off without another word, the guy he'd accosted immediately shifted his stance to devote his full attention to both me and Caligula. "No!" he said. He squinted a little. "It looks a little different from the ones I see on the Internet."

Then, to my horror, he sat down opposite me, next to the two smiling trainers, and began eating his salad. Through a mouthful of lettuce, he said, "Whatsh itsh name?"

"Uh," I said. "Caligula." And before either of them could say anything else, I went on. "Can one of you tell me what the hell's going on?"

Before they could respond to that, the girl who'd bugged me about getting Trapinches before woke up again. "Did somebody say- oh, right," she said, trailing off as she noticed me. "Nevermind."

She laid her head back in her arms and went back to sleep.

"Is something going on?" said the blond giant.

His smile looked decidedly unsettling now.

"Yes, there is," I insisted. "Why are you two talking to me?" And then the truth dawned on me. "Ooh. Do you want a battle?"

For the first time since I'd met them two minutes ago, the giants exchanged a significant look. When they looked back at me, I thought I could see a hint of hesitation in their slope of their still-smiling eyes. "Not at all! We just wanted to-"

"Well I do, now that the subject's come up," I decided. I wasn't buying their coy act for a second. I pulled out Caligula's Pokéball and returned her, then indicated the door with an imperious sweep of my arm. "After you."

"Why don't you finish your-"

"I don't feel hungry when I'm about to start a battle," I insisted. In reality, I _was_ still hungry... but I had a large stockpile of Aggranola bars in my backpack to keep me going for the rest of the day.

The blond woman tapped her partner on the shoulder and they exchanged a brief series of hand gestures. The guy's shoulders eventually sagged and, without much of a smile any longer, he accepted my challenge.

"Great!" I declared. "I know a place we can use."

* * *

Ten minutes later, I was back at the baseball pitch, about to engage in my third ever pokémon battle. Like I had with Amanda, I ran through the rules of our bout before we started.

"One on one! Returning equals forfeiting! Three! Two! One and _go Caligula_!"

Caligula and I stood very still for a very long moment, as we were confronted with our opponent for this battle.

"An onix?" I demanded. "A freaking _ONIX_?"

Standing in the garguatan shadow cast by his equally gargantuan snake monster, the giant man shrugged apologetically. The giant woman made some kind of remark in sign language, doubtlessly mocking me, but frankly I had bigger fish to fry right now.

"Okay, Caligula," I said, trying to stay calm. "We can do this."

The man called out to us. "Just forf-"

"Can it!" I spat. "Caligula! Bite!"

Caligula obediently opened its mouth and attempted to latch onto the stony beast before us.

It didn't work.

"Be gentle with it," the blond man cautioned his onix. "Now-"

"Bide!" I said, interrupting his order. Maybe Caligula could weather this attack and strike back, twice as strong as before. The onix hadn't moved an inch yet.

"Iron Tail," he said.

Gentle? _Gentle_? GENTLE?

His pokémon's reaction was immediate. Its tail evolved a blinding white sheen and struck out faster than my eye could follow, pounding Caligula into the ground with vicious force. A billowing cloud of dust burst from the point of impact: when it cleared, Caligula was embedded in the soil at the bottom of a gash in the field that stretched at least twelve feet long and was three or so feet wide.

Feeling my face grow hot with humiliation and rage, I silently recalled my starter.

"Hey," said the man. He walked up to me and offered me his hand, "Good-"

I glared up at his face and, unthinking, pulled my fist back-

* * *

\- and woke up to a wavy world of green and bright yellow, my sense of smell overwhelmed by the sharp scent of disinfectant. Everything felt numb.

Blearily, I felt my eyes out. My glasses were gone.

"Uooghh," said someone. It took me a moment to realize that it was me.

"Oh, I think she's awake," said a woman's voice. Momentarily, a shadowy figure entered my field of vision. "Hello! Here are your glasses!" A clumsy pair of hands attempted to shove them onto my face. I knocked them away and did it by myself.

"Holy hell," I said as the shadowy figure turned into a Nurse Joy. "What happened?"

"You spontaneously blacked out," she said cheerfully. "A rather charming gentleman brought you here to be treated!"

"Wha... what?" I asked. "Why'd I black out?"

"We're not sure," said the nurse, her mood dropping palpably. "You seem to be in good physical condition, with no evidence of drug use or alcohol in your system, and there are no pre-existing medical conditions listed on any of the records we have on you."

Listening to her lay it all out helped anchor me to the place and the moment, and I pulled myself into a sitting position. I was in a hospital bed, in what I could only imagine was the pokémon centre's wing for humans. The place was eerily reminiscent of the hallways at school, besides the much stronger smell.

It occurred to me that I'd spent the entirety of last night wide awake, waiting for my alarm clock to go off. I told her this, and finished by saying, "Could that be it?"

The nurse raised an eyebrow and then started laughing. Hard. "Yes," she finally managed after a full minute. Between gasps of laughter, she gave me back my backpack, my Pokédex and my sole Pokéball, told me that they'd fixed up my trapinch in the time that it had taken me to wake up, and that I was free to go. Feeling like my pride had taken a hundred Iron Tails to the face, I stormed out of the clinic, down the main corridor of the pokémon centre, and into the main lobby. It was high time that I skipped this stupid town.

As I passed through Southeast Gate, ignoring the guard's cheerful salute and greeting, the Allspice bell chimed three times. Three o'clock already- fainting had taken more than three hours from me. Remembering that I had fainted brought a scowl to my face, and I reached for the sole Pokéball at my waist. I pointed it in the general direction of the densely wooded Marma Forest, the living barrier that separated Allspice's peninsula from the rest of the Zan region.

"Alright, Caligula," I began as my pokémon's form coalesced in front of me. "We've got a lot of training to do before we're strong enough for the Ruby Conference." I knelt down in front of her, eliciting no reaction whatsoever. "Do you know what that is?" I was immensely gratified to see her cock her head. "It's a month-long tournament that happens once every year, in the middle of May. The winner gets to fight Zan's Elite Four. It's a chance to become the Champion of the Zan Region." This was textbook stuff, but it bore repeating to my new partner in the privacy of the route into Marma Forest. I briefly wondered where all of my classmates were, but I supposed that they'd all gotten ahead of me while I was unconscious.

"Now come on," I ordered Caligula. I stepped over and began walking, beckoning for her to follow me. When I looked back, she hadn't moved a single step. Instead, she was staring forlornly at me. Was it normal for pokémon to be this slow on the uptake to begin with? I was sure I'd seen livestreams of battles where pokémon told 'bank right' or '12 o'clock' reacted instantly to their trainer's commands, sometimes even winning a match on that kind of order.

I sighed and withdrew Caligula from where I stood, and then continued towards the forest. Maybe she just needed some time to get used to my voice. In the meantime, I mulled over the different species of pokémon that I could remember inhabited this area. Tropius were the big attraction here, since they were both really rare and pretty strong, but I doubted that Caligula could fight one in her current state. Whiteshore River, which bisected the forest into north and south halves, wasn't supposed to be wide enough for anything more significant than a surskit, but I knew that the beach it eventually led to was a good site for catching water-types. Other than that, the only things that I could remember from the national habitat lists were bug-types, and the occasional rodent pokémon, like zigzagoon or pikachu.

With this in mind, two things occurred to me once I reached the forest's edge and my gaze roamed from the buttressed roots of the trees in front of me, went up the rugged rusty lengths of their trunks, and drew to a halt at their leafy canopy. First, the forest was much _bigger_ than I'd expected. I had to crane my neck as far as it would go in order to even see the brilliant green leaves of the tree directly in front of me, and I hadn't even entered the forest proper yet.

Second, I didn't actually have any Pokéballs to catch anything with. I'd picked up potions and antidotes a week ago, on a school outing to prepare us for our journeys, but since it was illegal to sell or give Pokéballs to anyone without a trainer's license we'd been made to wait for them. I'd been in such a hurry to get out of town that I hadn't picked up the complementary five balls that all new trainers were supposed to get.

I looked back at Allspice City, which was now surprisingly far away. I'd only ever seen it from the outside a couple of times- once when we were leaving for a school camp in the Safari Park, and once... well. It had looked a little disappointing both of those times, a patchwork mess of glossy skyscrapers poking out from between dense blocks of older buildings, and this time was no exception. I didn't want to go back unless I absolutely _had_ to.

The plan blossomed into my mind. I would stick with just Caligula. Together, we would power our way through Marma Forest and get to Fennel Town, sustaining ourselves on my granola bars and potions, an experience that would hopefully get me to a roaring start with my awesome starter. Then, after a brief rest in Fennel, I would scrounge up a couple of other team members from the forest to help me tackle Fennel's Gym Leader.

Confidence surging back into me with every step, I strode into the forest.


	3. Getting Somewhere

"Bite!" I commanded Caligula. She closed her jaw on the ekans' neck as it attempted to drive its fangs into her skin, stopping it in its tracks. It launched something brown and sticky from the side of its mouth in an effort to blind her, but Caligula wasn't shaken in the least.

"Now Bite again!" Caligula released the ekans and moved in for another Bite. Still somewhat stunned, her target didn't think to evade the next attack- a misstep that sealed its fate. It fell limp in Caligula's mighty jaws without a sound.

"Alright!" I cheered. Caligula trilled through the ekans in her mouth, squinting in what I guessed was happiness. "Now let's go!"

The two of us were some distance away from the main track through Marma Forest. There weren't any pokémon on the track, so I'd decided that it was worth making a few detours along the way to Fennel Town to get some training in. Wild pokémon weren't the best sparring partners, but they would have to do until I could find a trainer.

I took a couple of steps and looked back at where Caligula had beaten the ekans. She hadn't moved an inch. The ekans lay unconscious in her jaws. I sighed and recalled her, leaving the ekans lying on the loamy forest floor. Did most pokémon start out not knowing how to follow their trainer? It bugged me a little more than I would have liked to admit.

The main track was easy enough to get back to, between my being a survival genius and my not being brain dead, as was remembering which way would actually get me to Fennel (as opposed to bringing me back to Allspice). I pulled out another Aggronola bar and tucked in as I continued on my way, making sure to securely stash the wrapper inside my bag.

As the day wore on, Caligula and I ran into several other critters; a pidove or two, a spearow, a sentret, and far too many wurmples. I wasn't too bothered by the unimpressive selection of opponents, though- it was for the best that I didn't run into anything particularly rare or strong while I didn't have any Pokéballs on me.

"Nice!" I shouted as Caligula dispatched yet another wurmple, this time in a single Bite. She was definitely getting stronger. "Now let go!" Caligula cocked her head and released the battered wurmple in her mouth, allowing it to crawl meekly back into the undergrowth. I grinned and pulled out another Aggranola bar from my bag (the fifth one today).

"Hey, uh, gal," I said, extending the bar to my badass trapinch. "Good work today. Have a treat?" This was the first Aggronola bar I'd offered to her, so I wasn't sure if she'd accept it. Fortunately, Caligula immediately opened her giant maw in order to let me deposit the bar inside her mouth. A frantic spate of chewing later, she made a crowing noise that I interpreted as thanks. Pleased, I turned around and strode back in the direction of the main track. The forest looked like it was getting darker, so I checked my Pokédex. Seven o'clock. It was time to set up camp, I decided.

A rustling sound from behind me stopped me in my tracks.

Before the source of the noise could get the drop on me, I twisted around, planting my feet as securely as possible into the ground. This would both prevent me from slipping on the foliage lying on the forest floor, and brace me for a tackle from any assailants.

The only thing behind me was Caligula, staring obliviously up at me as I frowned and scanned my rapidly darkening surroundings for signs of trouble. I took a cautious step backwards, which Caligula matched (if at a much less efficient ratio of steps taken to distance travelled). Then it hit me- that rustling noise I'd heard had been the sound of Caligula's footsteps! She was following me!

I couldn't stop myself from grinning like an idiot as I knelt beside Caligula and pulled another Aggranola bar out of my bag. This was really it, I marvelled as the heady sensation that came with watching my trapinch follow in my footsteps died down and Caligula accepted the large bonus to her dinner. I was really a trainer. The thought made me stand a little taller when I got back to my feet and continued on my way.

I knew from survival training at school that the main track would be a good place to camp out on, since it was flat, largely bare of plant life, and a site that most of the pokémon in this forest judiciously avoided. Blocking the path was also a non-issue this late in the evening; almost everyone on this road would have stopped and set up for the night at this point. All I had to do was set up the tent- child's play- and, in lieu of trying to find dry wood for a fire (a fool's errand in the humid July air), activate my specially issued Pignition-brand Artificial Fire, a handy gadget that looked like a pastel red box with a couple of buttons and dials on one of its sides. Knowing how to use it was, of course, one of the main scoring points for the practical exam back at Allspice, and I grinned in satisfaction as the aptly named "active side" of the box roared to life, pumping out heat and light without any need for firewood. Even on its lowest possible settings (for the sake of conserving its battery power), it would serve as a major deterrent for any unusually adventurous pokémon looking to take on the main road tonight. After a moment's thought, I turned off the heat entirely. The night was hot enough as it was.

I plonked myself down on the dirt path, a generous distance away from the PAF, and leaned luxuriously back against a tree on the edge of the path. Day one of my life as a trainer was drawing to a close. My trapinch was awesome, my calls had been amazing, and just _sitting_ , almost completely alone, in a dark forest, without any supervision, was _heavenly_.

* * *

I'd drifted off a little, hanging on the edge of consciousness, when suddenly I heard, in quick succession, a muffled _thump_ and the sound of my PAF deactivating. The switch from the pleasant half-light of having my eyes shut in a dimly lit setting to pitch blackness was disorienting, to say the least. I could still feel the bark under my back, and my desperately groping hands could only find dirt, small pebbles and dead leaves. The air was still thick with heat and moisture; I was still in the forest. It was fine.

Then I brushed against something that definitely wasn't dirt, a small pebble _or_ a dead leaf.

A hiss rang out from the darkness in front of me, and the next thing I knew I was screaming bloody murder. I shot to my feet and, barely managing to avoid tripping over the roots of the tree I'd just been lying against, beat a hasty retreat, through the darkness. My sole ambition was to get away from the hissing.

"Tra!" The valiant cry came tumbling through the darkness, cutting through my shock and fear. It was coming from the same direction as the hissing had.

"SA!" said something much louder, and therefore larger, than my trapinch. My heart stopped for a second, but with it came a sudden clarity. Trapinch were a subterranean species, which meant that they probably had ways to deal with fighting in darkness. With every fibre of my being, I hoped that meant Caligula would be able to find and attack our adversary.

"Caligula! Bite it!"

A hollow-sounding crack resounded through the night. She'd missed- crap. She was as blind as I was, which meant that we were screwed- and then I heard a second impact. "Trhh!" came Caligula's second battlecry, muffled by what I wanted to believe was the flesh of our attacker.

"Nice! Good job, Calig-"

Our invisible enemy interrupted me with another fervent hiss, and a crunching noise.

"Tra!" whimpered Caligula, quieter than anything else she'd said before.

"Ca-Caligula! Bite!" I needed to be able to see what was happening- I slapped at my pockets frantically, searching for my Pokédex. I couldn't afford to dig through my backpack and find the torch I had in there, but there had to be a flashlight app on the dex somewhere- and even if there wasn't, the light from the screen would be better than nothing. Bulge in my left pants pocket. I dug it out and quickly angled it at where I thought the fight was taking place, casting a pathetically small rectangle of white light over a section of the ground.

"Caligula! You there?" They hadn't made a sound for a while.

And then I found them- my orange trapinch struggling weakly in the purple coils of a humongous ekans, covered in green stains. Her jaws were useless here, held shut by the sinewy length of the serpent attacking her.

It fixed one wicked, yellow eye on me, as if daring me to do something about it.

So I did.

I hurled my Pokédex at it and, with the advantage of two free arms, followed the dex in a mad charge for the ekans. It must have been disoriented by the attack, because I managed to get my hands around it even in the darkness. Then I _squeezed_ , digging my fingers into its scales with vicious strength. The only thing that mattered in that moment was getting this monster off my pokémon.

My grip wasn't nearly as strong as a trapinch's, though, and my right shoulder exploded in pain as the snake launched its counterattack. I swear its fangs reached my bones. Baring my teeth through the pain, I shifted my grip so that my hands were at the base of the ekans' skull and then heaved back, relying on Caligula's weight and the strength of the ekans' bite to keep her from being pulled along with me and the ekans. The strategy seemed to work- after a few tense, agonising moments of heavy resistance, I toppled over backwards in a confused tangle of limbs and scaly ribbons of ekans body and slammed into the ground. The impact winded me, but I managed to work my finger into something that started leaking warm liquid near where I had taken hold of the ekans' neck- hopefully an eye.

With another round of sizzling in my shoulder and a _pop_ that I felt in my bones, the ekans started hissing up a storm- it must've detached itself from me out of pain. I drove the advantage as well as I could, scrambling with the body of the snake writhing on top of me until I had hold of something that felt like it was near the tail end of the snake. Then, fighting through the pain of the bite in my shoulder, I climbed to my feet and began whipping the ekans all over the place- against the ground, against trees, probably even against my own tent. Whenever I heard a sufficiently loud cracking noise, I made sure to repeat the stroke that made it at least a couple of times.

I don't know how long I teetered there, heart pounding, blindly slamming the ekans against anything that sounded like it hurt, but when I heard the sound of a Pokéball opening and felt the scaly thing in my hands evaporate I finally realised that I had my eyes shut. It took me a little effort to get them open, but once they did, I came face to face with two vaguely familiar people.

All of a sudden, my body turned into lead. I fell over.

* * *

My first thought was that I was really sore. My second thought was that it was really hot in my sleeping bag. My third thought was, wait, I don't have a sleeping bag.

I sat up in 'my' sleeping bag, then instantly regretted it. The sudden movement sent a jolt of pain through the entire right half of my torso. Bad enough to make me see stars for a couple of seconds.

"Janet, right?" said an unfamiliar voice. I blinked a couple of times, trying to work the blurriness out of my vision, then felt my face for my glasses. Not there. This was becoming a theme.

"Uh, here," said the voice. An indistinct figure coalesced from the soft blur of colours that made up the edges of my range of vision, and it extended a significantly more distinct hand- and my glasses!- towards me.

"Th-thanks," I said, putting them on and resolving all the colours back into coherent images. We were still in the forest. I was in a sleeping bag in front of a PAF. There were two rather Spartan-looking tents on the other side of the PAF from me, neither of which I recognised, and a few articles of clothing hanging on a set of clotheslines between them. I recognised my black shirt, which made me glance down at myself. I was in my undershirt, which had a large brown stain all over the right shoulder. My blood, I guessed. Everything felt like it was soaked in sweat. At least my pants looked like they were fine.

There were two other people here. Amanda Black and the Ninetales lady I'd seen at school. She must have been the source of the unfamiliar voice. Strange, she sounded more manly than I remembered.

"Did you seriously just say that out loud," said Amanda dryly.

"What?" Had I said that out loud?

"Yeah, you did," said the lady. She looked older than I remembered, too. "I'll take it as a compliment. The crack about my age, too," she added.

"Oh god," I muttered, burying my face in my hands.

"Anyway," the lady said. "Listen: you got mauled by an ekans last night. Do you remember that?"

"Are you sure?" muttered Amanda. "Looked more like _she_ was doing the mauling."

"Uh, yeah," I said, attempting a ginger nod but giving up halfway through since moving my neck at all felt like trying to hug a slugma.

"That's a good sign," noted the lady, ignoring Amanda completely. She leaned forwards and shone something bright into my eyes.

"Is she concussed?" asked Amanda.

"Probably not," said the lady. She stashed the bright thing- her Pokédex- away and brushed herself off. "I'm Daria. Do you know if you're allergic to ekans venom?"

"Uh, no," I said.

"Then we'd better hope that you're lucky," was Daria's only response as she retreated to her tent.

Amanda and I engaged in a brief staring match while she was gone, which ended when Amanda rolled her eyes and turned very deliberately to watch Daria digging through her tent. I shrugged (mentally- the physical action would be beyond me for a while) and copied her.

"Can you stand up?" said Daria when she returned from her search, holding a black ball covered in green spots that I recognised as a Dusk ball and a white tube of bandaging material that I recognised from our survival first aid kits. She clipped the ball to her belt when I unzipped the bag at my feet and successfully did stand up. It occurred to me that, besides the Dusk ball, she only had two balls at her belt. I'd never heard of a trainer who could afford Dusk balls travelling so light before. Maybe she kept other balls in her tent.

"Hold still," she told me, unwrapping the bandage in her hands. "I'm going to make you a sling for your arm."

I frowned. "It's fine," I said.

"It could be broken," pointed out Amanda. "Hurts to move, right?"

I grunted and, in total silence, begrudgingly let Daria work on me for the next five minutes. When the sling was done, she unclipped the Dusk ball from her belt and held it out to me.

"For being so co-operative," she told me matter-of-factly when I looked up at her in surprise. "Your ekans."

"My ekans?"

Daria nodded. "The one you fought last night."

"You're really giving it to her?" demanded Amanda, sounding outraged.

"She was the one who battled it," Daria said. "I couldn't have caught it if she hadn't weakened it so much first."

"Weakened it? She almost killed it!" Amanda snapped.

"So?" I asked, taking the Dusk ball with alacrity. Ekans were nothing amazing in general, but that specific ekans was something else. And it was in such a cool ball, too- expensive _and_ stylish.

Glowering at both of us, she subsided and stomped out of the makeshift campsite.

"Do you want to meet it now?" Daria asked me. "I took the liberty of giving it a potion. Gave the trapinch an antidote, too, since it was probably poisoned."

I shrugged and pressed the release button. The ekans materialized in front of us. Now that I could actually see all of it, plain and clear in the light of day, it looked far less frightening. For its part, the ekans studiously ignored the two of us, choosing instead to stare unblinkingly at the PAF behind it. In doing so, it revealed its right eye, which looked like it was gummed shut with a grey-blue knot of flesh.

"Uh," I said, slightly nauseous from the sight. "What's up with its eye?"

"Probably an injury it sustained when it was fighting, uh, you. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Ekans don't really rely on their vision," Daria said, a little too haltingly for my comfort. I nodded all the same, then inhaled sharply and regretted it as more pain shot down my right side.

"Your stuff's still back there," Daria continued, pointing down the track. "It was too much hassle trying to get everything in the dark, and we figured you'd wake up sooner rather than later."

I nodded contemplatively. This time, I managed to keep myself from wincing.

Another awkward silence. I could hear Amanda shouting something indistinct through the woods. Probably training her larvitar to work off some steam.

"So, uh," I croaked. "How did you find me?"

Daria shrugged. "We heard lots of screaming and shouting in the middle of the night, decided to investigate. Found you covered in blood, bludgeoning everything in reach with an unconscious ekans."

"Huh," I said, as blood rushed to my face and I quietly wished I could sink into the forest floor forever.

"It's alright, anyway," said Daria with another shrug. "You've probably earned that ekans' respect for life, judging by how he's acting now. Training him should be a cinch."

"Alright," I said. "I'll do that." I stepped over the PAF in the middle of the campsite and took hold of my surprisingly clean shirt, hanging on the clothesline. "This is mine, right?"

"Yeah," confirmed Daria.

"Thanks for cleaning it," I said, pulling it off the clothesline. My sling was going to make it hard to get it on, so I just slung the shirt over my shoulder for now. It wasn't like anybody was coming through here.

I turned back to Daria. "Anyway, uh, I'm going to go now. I... do you want to battle me?"

Daria looked a little taken aback, but eventually she shrugged. "Nn... no. You're still injured. Wouldn't be fair."

"But when I get better?"

"Sure," she said. "Next time we run into each other. We'll battle then."

Feeling strangely rejected, I gave her a small nod, thanked her one last time, and trudged down the way she had indicated before, back to my own little campsite. To pass the time, I reached for my Pokédex, meaning to register my new ekans to my name.

It wasn't there. What- oh, yeah. I'd thrown it at the ekans last night. The others must have missed it in the darkness.

Fortunately, a long walk later, I found it lying face-down on the road itself, only a short distance from my still-pitched tent. Nobody had picked it up or trod on it; maybe ending up as the last person in my year to leave town wasn't such a bad thing after all. Then I saw the time. Two o'clock. I grimaced. I hadn't really had a specific time that I wanted to wake up at, but I definitely didn't like the thought of waking up that late ever again.

That said, I reflected, I hadn't meant to get my hands on an ekans either. Without further ado, I tabbed through the request to register the contents of the newly detected Dusk ball on my person to my trainer account, and examined my new ekans' physiological attributes. Male, heavy for an ekans, knew the basics that you'd expect from any ekans. Not bad at all.

It only took me a couple of seconds to think up a name for the ekans- Fang- and say it out loud into my Pokédex, and then I set my sights on my tent. Putting it up had been easy with two arms, but now I had one trapped in a sling. I fingered the balls at my belt. Could I use Caligula and Fang to help me take the tent down?

"Fang! Caligula! Come on out!" My two pokémon exploded into the air in front of me. It suddenly occurred to me that the last time I'd released Caligula, they had been fighting to the death.

As soon as she saw the ekans, Caligula immediately retreated to me, seeking refuge behind my legs and cowering. That... hadn't been the reaction I was expecting, not that it was much better than the alternative scenario of continuing to try and kill him. Fang, for his part, just blinked his single eye and coiled around himself, seemingly oblivious to Caligula and me.

"Caligula," I said. I indicated the nearest rope keeping my tent tethered to the forest floor. "Bite attack on that rope!"

The fear fell from her stance immediately, and she lunged forwards, jaws opened wide. Unfortunately, she went for Fang rather than the rope. Hastily, I pressed the button on Fang's Dusk ball, returning him before he could retaliate.

"No, the rope!" I shouted, pointing again. Caligula stopped and stared up at me, clearly not understanding what I wanted. I was going to have to do this myself, wasn't I? I peeled my shirt off my shoulder and went hunting for my bag, which turned out to be safely zipped up in my tent. Daria and Amanda had probably stuck it in there to keep it out of the paws of any roving furret.

I stopped for a second. They couldn't have had _that_ much time to figure everything out, between making sure that my injuries weren't life-threatening and lugging my unconscious body all the way down the track from my campsite to theirs. And now that I thought about it, they hadn't _seemed_ all that tired.

Maybe Daria had a pokémon big enough to carry me in her arsenal. Like a nidoking or an aggron.

"Whatever," I said, out loud. I still had a tent to figure out how to pack. Absent-mindedly, I stuck my rolled up shirt in my backpack and withdrew an Aggranola bar. My breakfast for the day, I figured. I still had plenty of them left.

Then it dawned on me. I wasn't the only fan of Aggranola bars here.

I quickly scarfed down the bar in my hand and retrieved a second bar from the box in my bag, which I unwrapped and took outside.

"Hey, Caligula!" I said, waving the bar at her. "Want a snack?"

Caligula's jaws immediately snapped open and she waddled towards me. Deftly, I stepped over the first rope and held the bar behind it. Just as she slammed her jaws shut, around the both the bar and the rope, I yanked the bar clear of her mouth and held it far above her head. When she lifted her head up and began snapping, the sheer force of her muscles yanked the pin that the rope was attached to right out of the ground.

Three pins later saw me with my tent securely packed, and Caligula united with her Aggranola bar. After spending a couple of moments catching my breath- rolling up the tent had been a tough experience with just one arm- the two of us set off. With all the excitement of dealing with the aftermath of last night's attack out of the way, I quickly fell back into the routine of yesterday; walking along the trail, with occasional trips into the dense woods themselves to train up my pokémon. Caligula was performing as well as ever, and Fang looked like he was holding up. Poison-types did have a pretty easy time against other poison-types, especially the bugs, and Fang's Bite attack meant that he wasn't as stymied by them as they were by him.

* * *

The three of us arrived at Whiteshore River- Marma Forest's halfway point- at about six thirty, just as the leaves and vines above us were starting to go orange in the sun's dying light. I briefly considered putting up my tent, but quickly decided it wasn't worth the hassle. Instead, I took out my item capsule and pointed at the ground. My fancy dodrio alarm clock, and all the sheets and blankets that had been on my bed back in the dormitory, tumbled out. I snatched a pillow from the jumble and tossed it out of the range of the capsule, then returned everything. The pillow would have to do for tonight.

I summoned Fang from his ball. "Fang, Guard." It wasn't an attack as such, but hopefully it would be enough to keep other pokémon out of my hair while I slept this time. Ideally, I would've had Caligula out as well, but it seemed that her fear of Fang was here to stay, without me actively telling her to attack. I frowned a little at that thought. It didn't seem like the kind of thing that would matter, since I was pretty sure that ekans and trapinch wasn't a good combination for a double battle at all anyway, but it bothered me all the same.

With my ekans watching silently over me, I laid my head down on my pillow and drifted off to sleep, surrounded by the sounds of the forest.


	4. Getting Smarter

Thirty-six hours later saw me sitting in the cafeteria of the Fennel Town Pokécentre, enjoying a breakfast of pancakes and fruit salad alongside Caligula after a refreshing night in a real bed, and a brief visit to the human services wing of the Pokémon Centre. Even though my original plan had been to cut straight to Peppertown, widely known as the home of the weakest gym leader in the region, it had occurred to me some time during the grimy toil of yesterday's walk through the second half of Marma Forest that my team was particularly well suited to fighting the poison-types of Fennel's own gym. Taking it on now would mean getting to avoid a particularly nasty battle later on in my journey, since the leader would be obligated to use low-levelled pokémon on me- pokémon without access to any of the really bad poison-type attacks like Toxic or Venoshock.

As I worked through the pancakes, I thumbed my way through my Pokédex. It was a little grimier than it had been three days ago, but it still did its job. Right now, that job was showing me lists of pokémon local to Fennel Town and the routes connected to it, 013 and 015. Sentret and furret were a common theme, as were pidove and hoothoot and their evolutions. Neither category particularly screamed 'good' to me. With Caligula, I would have a much better flier than noctowl or pidgeot soon enough, and furret looked kind of lacklustre in all of the highlight videos I could find. An arbok would have done better in pretty much every single one of those battles, besides the ones against psychic- and ground-types- and it wasn't like I would be fighting any of _those_ in the Fennel gym.

By the time I'd finished eating my meal, I'd given up looking for a useful pokémon as a bad job. About the only captures that sounded good to me were the extremely rare elekid and magby that were supposed to reside on 015, which I'd of course already known about from my research into the meta of pokémon tournaments. Magmortar and electrivire were exactly the kind of pokémon worth knowing things about. I settled on just training up my current roster for a while, battling whatever trainers I could find on the 015 and vaguely hoping that I ran into something useful.

When I left the centre, full of pancakes and syrup, I was accosted by some guy shouting, "Hey, Janet!"

I affixed the culprit with a confused stare. "Do I know you?"

The speaker- some red-haired boy who looked like he might be my age- gaped at me for a couple of seconds. "Uh, yeah?" he said, recovering slightly. "It's me, Fergus March? I... you sat next to me in class this year. Pokémon Biology."

That was news to me. "Oh," I said.

"You didn't know?"

"Why would I?"

That stumped him too. Eventually, he took out a Pokéball and mumbled a challenge at me, which was more compelling than anything else he'd said that day.

I led the two of us in the direction of route 015, stopping at a suitably flat empty lot on the outskirts of Fennel. "This'll be a one-on-one battle with no time limit! Withdrawal equals forfeit! We battle until one side is unable to battle! Three-two-one-go, Caligula!"

My trapinch materialised on the sandy ground in front of me, clacking her jaws open and shut. It was time to try out some of her new attacks against someone with more brains than a wild wurmple.

Then again... I watched Fergus as he stood there, mouth hanging open, aghast at some invisible sight. Maybe he wasn't so much smarter than a wurmple.

"Oh, come ON!" he cried. "You have a trapinch _too_?"

"It's not exactly a jigglypuff, is it? And what do you mean by _too_?" I shot back, afraid I already knew the answer.

In answer, he pressed the button on one of the four Pokéballs clipped to his belt. Another trapinch materialised in front of mine.

After the initial wave of disappointment dissipated (it _was_ a little lame that I didn't have the only trapinch in our year), I started noting down the similarities and differences between our two trapinch. Besides the obvious colour difference- Caligula was dark and mottled, his trapinch was bright and solidly coloured- mine was noticeably smaller than his, both in terms of jaw and body size. It looked like his one's legs were thicker, too.

Fergus, for his part, still looked like he was on the brink of giving up on becoming a trainer then and there.

"Caligula!" I shouted. "Bulldoze it!"

My command, and the sight of my trapinch hurling dirt in the direction of his trapinch, seemed to startle Fergus into action. He quickly ordered a counterattack. "Bite!"

It didn't take- the wave of debris crashing into his trapinch kept it from closing the distance to Caligula, and I had her immediately follow it up with another Bulldoze.

Looking even more exasperated than before, Fergus said, "Mud Slap! Get that crap out of the way!"

"Bulldoze-then-Mud-Slap!" I rattled off. As the other trapinch shook off the remnants of our last Bulldoze, Caligula threw a final wave of dirt out and then surged forward in its wake. She slammed into Fergus' trapinch at the same time as her Bulldoze did, and the combined impact of the two attacks sent the trapinch skittering back.

I'd learnt from my battle with Amanda that Bite and its variations wasn't going to work on something with as big a mouth as another trapinch, and the classic call of ordering two attacks almost at once was something I knew a lot of big name trainers did.

"Mud Slap!" Fergus commanded again. This time, with Caligula in easy reach, his trapinch was able to make the attack connect, rearing back and smashing its head into her own without much trouble.

"Pull back!" I shouted, pulling a slightly squished Aggranola bar out of my pocket. Caligula immediately retreated to the source of the smell, and I shoved the bar back in my pocket. It had done its job for this battle. "Now Bulldoze! It's weaker now!"

Caligula slammed into the ground once more, sending out another wave of upturned dirt. Fergus gritted his teeth as his trapinch took the attack head-on. Bulldoze was turning out to be a really powerful tool against a slow, land-bound pokémon like another trapinch. I was lucky that he hadn't trained his trapinch as much as my one yet.

"Copy it!" Fergus shouted. "Bulldoze!" I blinked. Was that a thing you could do?

His trapinch looked back at him, in the universal language of mystification. I guessed the answer to that question was no.

"Bulldoze again!" I shouted.

Hanging his head in defeat, Fergus extended his Pokéball and returned his trapinch before the next attack could connect. "You win," he said, sounding dead inside.

"Awesome," I said. My Pokédex dinged like it had in the battle against Amanda, and I checked it. I'd earned myself another twenty Battle Points, putting me at a grand total of 34. Feeling pleased with myself, I let Fergus trudge back to town and turned to face my new training grounds.

* * *

Route 015, in contrast to the lush greenery of Marma Forest, was very decidedly barren. The soil here was cracked and grey, with only sparse pockets of yellowed grass jutting out of it for undergrowth. The air was almost prickly compared to the humid atmosphere of the forest and Allspice itself, feeling almost like a hot version of the winters I was used to. To the east, all the way at the end of the route, stood the Softurn Mountains, a multicoloured string of hills that were home to some of the region's rarest and toughest pokémon. Cinnamon City, the _de facto_ gateway to those mountains, and the Ruby Plateau beyond them, was just visible by the tips of its tallest towers- the rest of it was hidden away inside the huge crater that it had been built in. South of that was, of course, the largest volcano in the world. Mount Zan.

"Fang!" I said, summoning my ekans. "Let's get some training done."

Giving no sign that he'd understood what I said, he obediently slithered along behind me as I set off in search of wild pokémon to train on. I'd picked up Pokéballs last night, since my route to the Centre took me past a Pokémart. Even though even Great balls were above my pay grade right now, the original version would be fine for anything I was looking to fight here- _if_ I wanted to capture it.

We ran into a sentret shortly, and I gave the usual commands. "Wrap-then-Bite!" Fang snapped into action, unhindered by his missing eye as he landed the two attacks in swift succession. Constricted by my ekans' coils, the sentret whimpered and passed out before it could do anything.

"Oi!" shouted someone from behind me.

I turned around to find a guy standing between where I was standing and Marma Forest. He had a pidove on his shoulder. "Hey."

"Let's battle," he said, cutting straight to the point. I didn't know the first thing about him, but we were on the same wavelength.

"Return, Fang," I said. Had to preserve the element of surprise. He did the same with his pidove.

"One-on-one, no time limit, withdrawal equals forfeit," said the boy.

"Sounds good to me," I told him. "Three! Two! One! Go, Caligula!"

When the dust from releasing my trapinch settled, I found that he'd sent out his pidove again. Tricky guy.

It took to the sky, circling Caligula like a really lame mandibuzz.

"Gust!" said the boy with a weirdly smug grin. The pidove hooted in affirmation and swung its wings wildly, buffetting Caligula with a firm gale.

The attack wasn't much to my awesome pokémon, but my mind blanked when I tried to think of a way to win this. Caligula didn't have any ranged attacks yet. Fang's Poison Sting would have worked out, but we'd just agreed to a one-on-one. And that pidove could just keep blasting away at Caligula with Gust until she fainted, never once getting into range of her giant jaws.

I groaned internally.

"Gust attack again!" More wind.

I wondered if this was how Amanda had felt, three days ago, in the battle between Caligula and her larvitar. It had been a similar situation back then.

"Gust again!"

No, I decided, watching the attack waft Caligula back a couple of inches but do precious little else. That bird couldn't stay in the sky forever, and its attacks looked pretty pathetic, even if Caligula didn't technically resist them. I would just try to outlast it until it finally had to land.

To make sure that Caligula didn't end up getting blown _too_ far away by the pidove's combined Gusts, I tossed an Aggranola bar out to the halfway point between the other trainer and myself. Caligula charged at it and began wolfing it down, right in the centre of the pidove's orbit.

"Um," said the guy with the pidove, reminding me that he existed. "Are you... what are you doing?"

"Waiting," I said simply.

He seemed to understand what that meant, because he started firing out orders at a rapid pace. Gust after Gust hit Caligula head-on, over and over again. Hoping that the newly frenetic pace of the battle would soon start taking a toll on the pidove, I stared up at it, but the flying-type didn't seem to be tiring at all.

Eventually, Caligula just closed her eyes and flopped over on the ground. Great. I sighed and withdrew her. My Pokédex, in my pocket, dinged sadly. I pulled it out to find that not only had I wasted a full hour on this nonsense, I'd also lost all 34 of my Battle Points.

"What?" I demanded.

"Well, good battle," said the guy. "I'll see you around."

 _I sure hope not_ , I grumbled internally, as he walked past me to get into Fennel Town. I thumbed Caligula's Pokéball at my belt. I'd probably have to heal her up, even though a bunch of stupid air currents had no business knocking her out in the first place.

Looked like I needed to get my hands on some more Pokémon with projectile attacks, or something that could currently fly. I frowned. Technical machines tended to actually _cost_ Battle Points, as opposed to potions and the three basic kinds of Pokéballs (which were available essentially freely as long as you had a certain number of Battle Points). The few TMs that didn't work that way, like Surf and Rock Smash, were given out at particular badge numbers. I wasn't sure why, but either way that meant I only really had two options- to train Caligula until she had a projectile attack of her own, or to catch something that had either that or the ability to fly.

Until then, I would open my battles against trainers with Fang.

* * *

"Fletchling!" cried my latest opponent as a final barrage of Poison Sting from Fang brought down his fletchling. I laughed, half at the sight of another bird falling to my superior strategy, and half at the idiocy of giving your pokémon the same name as the rest of its species. Some people just didn't have any brains _or_ pride.

As the other trainer dejectedly recalled his pokémon, Fang began emitting bright white light. I threw my arms up in front of my face and staggered backwards from him- the light was bright enough that it was turning the insides of my eyelids bright red, even through my arms. After a few seconds of the mildly painful light show, it subsided, and I opened my eyes a crack to see what was going on. Where Fang had been coiled, there was now an arbok.

"Whoah," I said, more to myself than anything. The guy with the fletchling, who'd been just as taken aback by the sight, was looking at Fang with just as much reverence as I was, his loss all but forgotten.

"Whoah," he agreed.

I returned Fang with a grin in the trainer's general direction, and set off back in the direction of Fennel Town. Now that I had a good way to hit flying enemies, my plan had moved on. With an arbok at my side, all I needed to do now was challenge the gym. First, though, I wanted to drop my bag off at my room in the centre, since the catching thing had turned out to be a wash and I didn't want getting in my way for as big a battle as my first ever gym battle. I managed to do that without event once I got into town, and then it was back on track to the gym.

For some reason, there was lots of traffic in the sky above us as I wound my way through the sparsely populated roads of Fennel Town. I could see a couple of salamence and unfezant, and even another flygon, heading in the opposite direction from me. They must have been heading out from the direction of Cayenne and Peruvia, but I couldn't begin to fathom why.

In any case, it didn't look like they were landing anywhere near Fennel Town, so as far as I was concerned they weren't worth watching for much longer. They flew off over the distant Marma Forest, and I kept on walking. I had a badge to get.

The gym itself was totally empty, besides a single gym orderly who looked like she was chewing gum. Looked like nobody else had my idea of challenging the leader here early, not even the guy with the other trapinch. I swaggered on up to the lone orderly and passed her my Pokédex. "One battle, please!" I said.

"Alright," said the orderly. She took the dex and plugged it into a device attached to her computer- a Pokédex reader. It would call the data from my trainer account and book me for the next available slot on this gym leader's schedule. The gym leader would automatically be given information about my current number of badges and projected experience level, and that would tell him what kind of team to use against me.

The process was supposed to take under five seconds, but the orderly and I spent about a minute staring at each other, across the desk, waiting for my dex to register properly.

"Hm," said the orderly. "Something's not right here. Hang on, lemme go get him." She slouched out from behind the desk and went through the main door to the battlefield in the gym. There was a wad of bright pink bubblegum stuck on the back of her seat.

She came back in a couple of seconds. "Looks like something came up. You'll have to come back here tomorrow."

"Sorry?" I asked her, certain that I'd misheard her somehow.

"Something came up. Come back tomorrow," she repeated. Slowly.

"What the hell came up?"

The orderly shrugged. "Do I look like a bloody gym leader to you?"

Fuming, I walked out of the gym, feeling like a wound up Pumpkabox- only instead of shouting "Pumpkaboo!" and giving kids candy when I finally sprung, I had a mind to punch someone in the face. Preferably the gym leader.

It was as I imagined crushing him in the coils of my arbok that I walked straight into him.

See, the Fennel Town gym leader was the kind of guy who had a really easy to forget name, half because he never _did_ anything like Mila or Avis did, and half because it was just super common. It was like Archer or Acheron or something.

His _appearance_ was another story, though. He was the only gym leader I knew of who rocked bright purple hair styled into two weird spikes that up from the sides of his head like a purple pikachu's ears, fuzzy pink arm and leg warmers (even in summer), and a necklace made of what looked like human teeth. Really, he was the only _person_ I knew of who did any of that, let alone gym leader.

That was who I'd just walked into. The guy I was fantasising about punching out. That guy.

Shocked out of my simmering anger and straight into shame, I immediately launched into an apology, half for walking into him and half for gleefully imagining the sight of his death, but he brushed me off and just kept walking. Behind him strode a blonde woman in a pinstriped blue and grey suit and shades, who looked me up and down as she walked past me but didn't say anything. Behind _her_ walked a hulking nidoking, easily twice my height and ten times my weight. It was carrying a huge bundle of dark grey fabric and what looked like tripod legs. It, like the gym leader, ignored me completely.

I stared at backs of the bizarre entourage as they walked off, heading towards Route 013- the only place surrounding Fennel Town that I hadn't visited yet.

Between their absolute silence and the obvious hurry that they were in, it took me approximately half a second to decide that I needed to follow them. I let them put a bit of distance between us, silently summoned Fang, and crept along behind them.

The five of us (the three in the gym leader's crew and myself and Fang) quickly left the town limits, but instead of heading down Route 013 like I'd expected, the gym leader cut sideways, into a grove of trees with much broader leaves and smoother trunks than the ones in Marma Forest. We were heading inland, judging by the fact that the Softurn Mountains visible through the trunks of the trees were getting closer. Unlike in Marma Forest, there was no track here, but the nidoking was knocking aside any trees in its way like they were toothpicks, leaving me a wide path in its wake and letting me avoid having to dodge any spiky bushes or duck under low-hanging branches. I had no idea what the nidoking was there for, but I counted it as a lucky break that they hadn't seen fit to put it in its ball.

When the grove finally ended and the group in front of me went out onto open terrain, I hesitated slightly. If they turned around, I wouldn't have anything to hide behind. Then again, I hadn't come all this way to turn tail at the last possible second... and really, that nidoking was probably so thick-set that they wouldn't be able to see me unless they actually stopped and went around the nidoking. I pressed on, still not understanding what the hell was going on.

The nidoking stopped. I glanced to my left and right, searching for some cover, but found nothing- so I dived to the floor and pull Fang on top of my head. From a distance, my blonde hair would probably look like an extension of the face on Fang's hood. Maybe.

"Stay," I hissed at him. He just flexed his coils, which I took as a sign of acquiescence.

The blonde woman and the gym leader now stood on either side of the nidoking, and seemed to be busy extracting the metal sticks bundled up in the pokémon's arms. The gym leader planted one of the sticks in the ground in front of him, and his companion did the same. Then they each put another stick on top of the sticks in the ground, and then did it again. Finally, the gym leader pulled one last stick from the nidoking's bag and lifted it so that it was upright between the tops of the two stick-towers. When he let go of it and brought his hand back to his side, it rotated in place, bridging the gap between the two towers through some bizarre levitation.

Absolute stillness. The structure that they'd just built looked like a doorway, tall and wide enough to admit even the nidoking, but it seemed kind of... pointless. I wished I was in a position to give my glasses a rub, but that would mean getting up and risking getting caught.

All of a sudden, a ball of fire erupted from inside the doorway, seemingly out of nowhere. I jumped a little in my skin, but it seemed to have left the gym leader and the woman unscathed. When the fireball cleared, the doorway looked like it had been filled with a dark red canvas. The two trainers silently released two other pokémon, in addition to the nidoking- a blastoise and a bright red krookodile- and then the whole group piled into the doorway, the blastoise first.

Then the stick that had completed the doorway popped free of the whole structure and fell to the floor. In that instant, the red canvas vanished.

I blinked. The three pokémon, not to mention their trainers, should've been right there on the other side of the 'doorway'. They weren't.

I half-heartedly fought the urge to get up and investigate further, conscious that they could come back out of that doorway at any second, but my mystification quickly overpowered my malnourished respect for authority. I peeled Fang off my head and made for the seventh stick, which I figured I could use to reconstruct the doorway and follow the gym leader into... wherever they'd gone.

I frowned at the grassy floor on the front side of the doorway, where stick was lying. The fireball had seared a black cone into the floor there, but everything behind the doorway was untouched. I reached forward, expecting my hand to pass straight through the doorway... only to hit a cold, clammy surface. It was like touching a window or a mirror. Those were transparent, too, although this invisible wall was on a whole new level.

I bent over and reached for the stick lying on the floor. As soon as my hand made contact with it, it began vibrating.

"Warning: this unit has been compromised," a tinny voice coming from the stick informed me. "All units within 50 metres will self-destruct shortly. Five. Four. Three-"

I hurled the stick as far as I could at the grove of trees that I'd entered the clearing through. It exploded harmlessly in the distance. Thankfully, the six sticks behind me didn't explode with it, but I made a mental note to never touch them ever.

Not being able to touch the sticks put me in a bit of a pickle, though. I wouldn't be able to reconstruct the doorway and get through the... force field, or whatever, without them. I sighed.

"This bites," I said, to nobody in particular. Fang hadn't moved at all since I'd stopped wearing him as a disguise, so he was about sixty feet too far to hear what I was saying. Not only had I been denied a gym battle, I wasn't even going to be able to see what the gym battle had been cancelled _for_. I groaned and fell back onto the grassy floor of the clearing and stared up at the blue sky above, spread-eagle on the grass. It was still midday, in spite of all the time I'd wasted today.

As I moped, Fang slithered quickly over my stomach, in a rare display of initiative. I sat up and watched him go, letting bemusement take the place of my annoyance. I had no idea what he was up to, but I guessed that him being up to something was a start. The greats had always had stories like that to talk about in the interviews I'd read, like Alena Hale's story about how her mareep had once managed to steal every single left sock in the Yarrow Village Pokécentre while she was out in a tournament.

I watched with vague interest as Fang's trajectory took him halfway to the trees surrounding this clearing. Then he turned a sharp left, and I gaped as his head- and then his entire front half- was swallowed up by thin air.

In the span of a second, my arbok had vanished completely.


	5. Watershed Pt 1

I jumped to my feet and rushed in the direction that Fang had gone, almost tripping over myself in the process. I extended an arm to steady myself, and ended up planting it securely on the same cold wall that had blocked me from going through the doorway.

A plan occurred to me. Keeping one hand on the wall, I ran up to where Fang had vanished. The wall seemed to angle at this point, leaving me with an impression of a shape that wasn't quite a cube but definitely wasn't a dome. I kept going- the wall angled again about sixty paces later, and then once more another sixty paces later.

Now I could hear shouts and the sounds of pokémon. I sprinted along the next wall, and came face to face with an unexpected sight.

Fang was in the middle of a crowd of poochyena and wurmple, lashing out with vicious attacks as they mounted their own unsuccessful offence on him. Several trainers in heavy black clothes and ski masks stood around him, waving Pokéballs and being generally ineffective.

Automatically, I threw down my other Pokéball. "Caligula," I commanded, "Help Fang! Bulldoze!"

The attack rippled out from my position, hurling wurmples and poochyenas aside with ease. A lone pidove circling in the sky caught sight of us and attempted to divebomb Caligula, but I made sure she was ready. A quick Bite took the pidove out of commission.

The trainers in ski masks quickly switched their attentions from Fang to Caligula and myself once they realised where the Bulldozes were coming from, and my throat tightened in apprehension. It was a good kind of apprehension, though, better than the blind fear that had consumed me when I'd seen Caligula losing to Fang in the forest.

I knew in my gut that I'd lose if I let them swarm me and Caligula, but I noticed that they'd completely forgotten about Fang. "Fang!" I shouted, even as I backed quickly away. "Wrap one of the humans!"

The order was more complex than a normal attack command, but it seemed like evolving had given Fang a few more brain cells to play with. Sure enough, he did exactly as I asked, lunging at the trainer nearest to him and ensnaring them in his coils.

It was just in time, too, as I finally backed into the invisible wall.

To the trainers, I shouted, "Stop! Or your friend dies!"

They stopped. They looked back at the straggler who'd been caught by my arbok. They recoiled as they realised that I wasn't kidding.

"Now," I said, puffing my chest out and projecting my voice as much as possible. "My arbok's fast enough to catch an arcanine at full pelt, and his venom can kill an adult donphan in under a minute." I had no idea if what I was saying was true at all, but the most important thing about lying out of your ass is speaking authoritatively. "So if you want to live, put your hands on your head and lie down on the ground."

They did as I said.

"Caligula, Bulldoze everything."

A wave of upturned dirt shot out from my trapinch and slammed into the assorted wurmple and poochyena, and their trainers.

"Bulldoze again."

Another wave.

"Bulldoze again."

By this time, the pokémon were unconscious.

"Bulldoze again."

One of the trainers moaned a little. The one wrapped up in Fang's embrace.

"Shut it," I told him. Then, to Caligula, "Bulldoze."

"W-what are you doing?" stuttered one of the trainers on the floor near me.

"I'm knocking you out, stupid," I told him. "Now shut up or you'll get a visit from Fang." He did as he was told.

It ended up taking quite a while, but eventually I had all of them unconscious and half-buried under a thick layer of Bulldozed earth. I took the liberty of dealing with the idiot getting held by Fang personally, slugging him in the face with my best haymaker. With everything under control, I finally relaxed my guard and started taking inventory of my surroundings.

Besides the trainers who had tried to assault me and my pokémon with their stupid wurmples and poochyenas, there were also two large black aircraft that looked a little like really fat, small planes. Their landing gear and boarding doors were both open, which let me give them a quick search for more trouble. It looked like they were both empty- everyone must have come out when they saw Fang show up and start kicking their asses. One of the aircraft had a bunch of black plastic water bottles lining its back, which I thought was kind of weird.

Everything here had been completely invisible from the other side of the clearing. The wall that the gym leader had gone through mustn't have been actually transparent- just covered by a hologram or a mirage or something.

The big thing, of course, was that there was a copy of the gym leader's doorway on this side of the invisible structure, made up of the same weird sticks. This one was actually complete. I guessed the bad guys wanted to have a getaway route handy. Through it I could see a brick wall with a large, jagged hole blasted into it, revealing a scientific-looking interior. Now that I had an idea of what the doorways did, it occurred to me that the red canvas I'd seen when the gym leader had entered his doorway must have been the front side of this brick building.

I looked out at all the unconscious trainers with their heads buried in the ground, and the two planes.

I had to destroy the planes, I decided. They must have sent agents into the building itself, and I didn't want anybody coming out and being able to escape easily while I was exploring the building myself. I went up to the one with the water bottles inside it and picked two of the bottles up. They were both heavy with water. Grinning to think that I'd come up with another brilliant plan, I popped open their caps and brought them to the cockpit of the same plane. Then I squirted water all over the controls.

The fact that nothing seemed to happen was slightly disappointing. Maybe the controls were waterproof? The planes definitely looked pretty high-tech. I sighed and wistfully looked down at Caligula, who had waddled up to the stairs leading into the cockpit and was now staring blankly up at me. If I'd been able to start with a fire- or electric-type...

I dropped one of the water bottles, then shifted my grip on the other one so that I could hold it two-handed. Holding it like a club, I started pounding at the displays and controls with as much force as I could muster, splintering glass and warping plastic with each blow. After a couple of minutes of this, I dropped the bottle and took hold of something that looked a little like a gearstick in a car between the seats in the front of the plane, and _pulled_. It swung towards me with little resistance at first, within the grooves that the plane had been manufactured with in the first place, but then it hit the end of those grooves with a solid _thunk_. Gritting my teeth, I planted one foot over the bar and kept pulling until it finally shot out of the mechanism, trailed by a mess of wires. I tossed it as far as I could into the treeline, and then went up to the other plane and gave it the same treatment.

With the planes out of the way, I withdrew Caligula and beckoned at Fang. My arbok released the unconscious human in his grasp and slithered to my side.

Together, we entered the doorway.

* * *

It was searing hot inside the invisible compound, probably the work of the pokémon that had almost roasted the gym leader with a fireball earlier. Sunny Day attacks could give humans heatstroke if their user was strong enough. A sudden flare brightened up the walls of the compound around me- they didn't look so invisible from the inside, I noted. Under all the soot and smoke caking them, they looked like they used to be white.

I quickly clambered through the jagged hole in the brick building in front of me. It looked like this place was a building within a building. The soot wasn't as bad in the white halls of _this_ place, and I soon encountered a staircase that looked almost spotless. It only went down, so I figured that I'd take it as it was.

There was nobody here. Nothing but cavernous, empty halls, stretching out as far as I could see, and then some. Fang by my side, I wandered through them, my eyes roving over the walls, ceiling and floor, looking for some clue as to what this place was _for_. Unlike the halls on the floor above, the walls here were dark grey, and the floor clanged like it was hollow with every step I took. It didn't seem to consist of sheets or panels- just a single, continuous piece of metal under my feet. I eventually happened on a lone door, guarded by a lone trainer (dressed just like the ones outside) and their lone poochyena. I couldn't exactly surprise him, but I was faster than him.

"Fang, Bite!" Fang sprung forwards, hood flared, and the trainer stumbled back, his poochyena forgotten. It tried to avoid my pokémon's attack, but it was no use- Fang caught up to it soon enough and knocked it out with ease. Before the trainer could scream anything, I grabbed them by the throat.

"Don't. Say. Anything," I told them in a low voice. "Or the arbok bites you."

They nodded frantically, in complete silence.

"Now come with me," I said, and I retraced my footsteps, dragging the trainer along behind me. At the staircase I'd first encountered, I gestured at a wall. "Would you like the honours?"

"W-wh-what?" asked the trainer in a voice that quivered with fear.

"Slam your head against the wall," I told him.

He gulped and did just that. A bone-crunching _THUD_ and he was down for the count. I had to admit that I was a little impressed. I wasn't sure that I could've knocked myself out like that.

Anyway, now that I knew that there were more of these trainers inside the compound, the next step was pretty obvious. I stripped the unconscious trainer out of his stupid black jacket and mask- I figured that his pants could stay on, since mine were black anyway. As I tried to slip the mask on, I groaned. It was soaked in sweat. These guys had been cooking down here for a while. More than that, it didn't seem like it wanted to fit over my glasses, or my awesome ponytail. I pulled my glasses and hairtie off and stowed them in one of my pants pockets. My hair was streaming out from underneath the mask, but I could probably shove it into the jacket... yeah, that would work. Then I returned Fang, just in case arbok weren't pokémon that these guys were meant to use. Finally, I dragged the unconscious guy up the stairs and gave him a home around the corner. He ended up with a rectangular imprint in his cheek, but hopefully anybody coming up the stairs would miss him.

With my work done and my new (and extremely hot and uncomfortable) disguise equipped, I strode back to the door. Hopefully they hadn't noticed that their guard was missing.

When I rounded the last corner, my heart sank. They had. No less than twenty of them were standing out in the hallway, hands on their hips, brown sacks slung over their shoulders, looking around. Twenty on two were not good odds, especially in a place where Caligula couldn't really use Bulldoze. I was just going to have to get this right.

One of them caught sight of me as soon as I saw them, and waved me over. "Hey, have you seen Mike?"

My mind worked quickly. "Oh, yeah," I said. "Boss said that we were done down here. I told him to tell you guys." They were all staring at me. "But it looked like he didn't, so, you know. I came down to get you."

The one who'd seen me first clapped her hand on my shoulder, and I almost jumped- but then I breathed an internal sigh of relief as she said, "Oh, thanks, then. We've been done down here for a while anyway."

With pause that might have been accompanied by a wink through her ski mask, she pulled a weird Pokéball out of the sack over her shoulder. Its top was mostly pastel green, with two yellow rings arranged in a concentric pattern on top of it. I didn't know what kind it was off the top of my head, but I'd seen them every now and then, in livestreams and the occasional TV show.

So these guys were pokémon thieves. Made sense, between the outfit and the honestly pathetic selection of pokémon they'd fielded so far. You didn't become a pokémon thief because you were _good_ at catching them on your own.

"Awesome. I'm just gonna go check on the other guys," I said, silently praying that there _were_ 'other guys' for me to go check on, "and then I'll join you guys on the planes."

"The way's clear?" said the pokémon thief, seeming to buy my ruse.

"Yeah, duh," I said. "The boss only sent me down here once h-we were sure the gym leader wouldn't screw things up for us."

The thief nodded, and she and her group of twenty trooped off, back the way I'd come.

I gave a sigh of relief once the last of them had gone, then turned to the room that they'd just been pillaging. Between all the secrecy of this place- it was in an invisible building that a gym leader needed a weird gadget to get into, which itself was in the middle of nowhere- and the fact that an apparently huge organization of thieves was trying to get into it, it seemed a foregone conclusion that the pokémon here were either rare, powerful, or both.

My eyes flickered to the end of the hallway that I hadn't yet visited (from here, where the guard had been standing earlier, I could see that there was another staircase leading down around the corner), and then I gave in to the temptation. Even though the thieves were bound to come running back here at any minute, once they'd discovered what I'd done to their planes and their buddies outside, I had to see these pokémon for myself. Maybe they could even help me take out some of the bad guys.

The room itself was pretty uninspiring compared to the hall it was attached to. It was little more than a long, narrow tube lined with murky green plastic crates. Most of the crates had had their lids pried off- and inside each one, there were still tons of the same green Pokéball as the one that the thief had shown me.

With the utmost care, I picked one up and aimed it at the floor. I pressed the release button.

Nothing happened. Then my Pokédex beeped.

Conscious that I was working on borrowed time, I quickly pulled it out and inspected it.

" _ERROR: P_ _oké_ _ball not registered to trainer's account. Trainers may not release p_ _oké_ _mon that they do not own in this area._ "

That was weird, I thought. I'd been able to send out Caligula before I'd even had an account back at school. What was so special about this place?

I banished the error message and a different kind of message altogether popped up.

" _Unregistered P_ _oké_ _ball detected. Register under trainer account #17413-O, JANET PROSPER?_ "

That was... weirdly lucky. I picked up another Pokéball, and the same message popped up. I guessed that all of these balls were unregistered for some reason.

I looked out at the mass of unclaimed Pokéballs in front of me. I couldn't very well take them all, for a large number of reasons. It would look really, really suspicious to anybody watching the PC system if my account just randomly haemorrhaged a bunch of rare or powerful pokémon all over the place one day, especially since this was just day four of my adventure. And whoever was in charge of this place would probably notice if they were all gone, once the thieves were finally dealt with.

But they probably wouldn't miss just one pokémon. These pokémon were all unregistered, which meant that so far _nobody_ had been able to let them out of their balls. So they couldn't have been trained, which meant I wasn't breaking up anybody's sacred partnership with a pokémon by doing this.

Before I could argue myself into saying no, I pressed 'yes'.

* * *

Apparently, my newest teammate was a 'lileep'.

What the mew was a lileep? It was apparently a known species of pokémon, since my Pokédex was able to come up with pictures and even videos of it on demand, and even a ridiculous amount of natural journals on the topic- easily twice as many as there had been on trapinch and its evolutions- but I'd never even _heard_ of it before today. It looked kind of stupid, honestly. Just like the kind of pokémon that a bunch of nerds would study obsessively forever.

I was half-tempted to try another Pokéball, but I'd decided that this was enough indulging in curiosity for one day. I still had at least one more floor to explore, and I had the feeling that the thieves were going to catch me soon if I didn't get a move on.

Shoving the light green ball into my pocket, I released Fang once more and the two of us made for the next staircase. This one was much wider than the last one, although the corridor it led into looked about as wide as the corridors on this floor. On the other hand, it seemed that there was just one corridor down here.

At the end of it was a door; a massive, ironclad affair that was covered in blinking lights and all kinds of bars and levers. In front of that, some distance ahead of it, stood a single person.

I stopped. They were a little too far away for me to make out anything more distinct than the fact that they looked like they were human, but after running into all the trainers in masks down here, I doubted that closing the distance would let me see any more than that tidbit. Something about the way they were standing set me on edge.

Subtly, Fang inched ahead of me.

Together, we approached them.

"Who're you?" I asked, stopping once I was sure that the person could hear me clearly. Like the other thieves, this person was clad in black, but that was where the similarities ended. Instead of a ski mask, they wore a metal faceguard that seemed to be fused to a cloak that they wore wrapped around their body. I couldn't make out their figure at all beneath their cloak, but the single red dot on the right side of their faceguard- the only 'facial feature' that they had- gave me the creepy feeling that they could see a lot more about me than I wanted them to know.

"Who are _you_?" the person asked back in a voice that blended male and female, bass and soprano, fast and slow all together into a single, all-consuming entity. A voice synthesizer. A good one, too, probably.

"My name is Janet Prosper," I said, the confidence in my voice belying my growing unease. "And I'm gonna be the best trainer in the world one day."

The person didn't laugh. I'd almost expected them to, almost dreaded it, but they didn't laugh. Not even one of those cliché villain laughs that I always used to see in Saturday morning cartoons, before watching pokémon battles had become my main leisure activity.

"A good dream," they said simply. "You won't be able to fulfill it if you die down here."

"What?" I demanded, struggling not to let the fact that my blood had just frozen in my veins bubble up to the surface.

"If you advance any further, I will be forced to stop you," they said.

"You and what army?" I shot back.

They didn't say a word, or move an inch. One second, there was nothing behind them. The next, a milotic as thick as I was tall materialized behind them. A shower of water exploded out from it, drenching the ground around them. It didn't escape my notice that even though the person in front of the door had been standing right in the path of the watery spray, they (and a circle of the floor around them) were still bone dry.

"Camouflage," I said evenly, as my legs threatened to collapse into jelly and take me with them. That milotic was _huge_. And it had been coiled there, invisibly waiting, for God knew how much time. Milotic were one of the most competitive picks in the training meta right now, which meant that I knew a ton of stuff about them, but even I hadn't known that they could do that.

"No," the trainer before me corrected me in their androgynous voice. "Mirror Coat."

I couldn't trust myself to respond without giving into hysteria (of _course_ it was Mirror Coat, that made _so much_ sense, never mind the door, that's just what the attack _DOES_ ), so I didn't.

"Now," said the trainer. "You have a trapinch, an arbok, and a lileep at your disposal. I have my milotic."

I grimaced underneath my mask. At this point, it didn't even matter how they'd known my entire roster. I wasn't going to win this.

Despite everything, I stood my ground. "So what?"

For the first time since I'd seen them, they moved. Pulled something out from underneath their cloak.

"Catch." They tossed something flat and silvery at me. It cut through the air precisely, homing in on me with fluid grace. I snatched it out of the air before it could hit me in the face.

It was a TM.

"That TM contains the attack Hyper Beam. It's yours if you leave."

I looked at her long and hard. A free TM, if I surrendered here. And a good one, too. All I had to do was turn around. There would be no witnesses. Nobody to see Janet Prosper run off with her tail between her legs.

Nobody but me.

 _Crack._

I tossed the two halves of the TM aside. Something in my chest twisted into a knot as I pointed imperiously at the asshole who thought they could buy _my_ surrender.

"Fuck you," I declared. "Fang, Poison Sting!"

"Zenta," they said. "Crush her."

They almost sounded happy.


	6. Watershed Pt 2

A swirling torrent of water swept up Fang and I and hurled us bodily back down the hallway, back up the stairs we'd just come down, straight down the central corridor of the next floor up, up the stairs at the end of _that_ corridor, and then slammed us into the white ceiling of the building's first floor. Sopping wet and bruised all over, we dropped to the floor, utterly destroyed. Fang, having been ahead of me when the milotic had first attacked, broke my fall with his own battered body.

"Thanks," I mumbled drunkenly, fumbling at my belt for his ball. When I missed it the first two times, I blearily looked down at my belt. Everything looked fuzzy for some reason, but the balls were all different colours, so I just picked the bright green one and felt for the button on it. Fang vanished from underneath me, and I fell the short distance that returning him left between me and the ground with a cold, wet _thump_.

That had not been good.

It had been... very bad.

Glasses! I felt my face for my glasses. Couldn't find them. Great. They must have been knocked off when I took a fucking Hydro Pump to the face.

I groaned and attempted to lift one of my legs. Wasn't sure which one, but whichever one it was, moving it _hurt_. Not as much as right after Fang had bit me, but enough to make me see stars. I tried the other, or at least, tried to try it. Achieved the same results.

Hopefully the signals were just getting scrambled and I was trying to move the same leg both times. Another groan. It was me again. For the second time in four days I was so hurt I couldn't move. For the third time in four days I was lying down without my glasses on, wondering what I'd done to deserve any of this. For the fourth time in four days I

Hm. Actually there wasn't anything I'd done on all four days right now. Did battling count? I guessed it did. For the fourth time in four days I'd battled pokémon. So at least I had that to look forward to.

Through the fog in my mind, I frowned, or at least I _thought_ about frowning. That didn't sound like it was making the same point as the other thing I'd thought. Things I'd thought?

Okay, I thought to myself. So I turned into some unfocused navel-gazer when I'm half killed by a pokémon's attack. At least I wasn't whole killed. That- that sounded worse than being half killed. Twice as worse.

I fainted.

* * *

I woke up to a body that felt like it was full of the essence of getting punched. Experimentally, I tried to prop my torso up on my arms. Apart from the bit where every single muscle in my body above my waist screamed in protest, it worked fine. I bent my knees, keeping my feet flat on the floor, and continued to ignore the silent litany of my bruised nerves as they begged for mercy. Then I pushed myself off the ground, using my sore arms to steady myself as my body slowly got used to being upright again.

I swayed a little precariously a couple of times, but eventually I was standing up, muscles creaking like nails were being rammed through them. Then I started walking, and thanked the powers that I hadn't brought my bag with me. Having to walk with that heavy thing weighing me down would probably have killed me, in the state that I was in now. Even the water soaking my clothes was a burden, although it was keeping me cool. I gingerly pushed my arm out, feeling for the wall. As soon as I made contact with it, I leaned heavily into it, taking as much weight as was humanly possible off my legs. Yeah, it got a little sore at the points where my body touched the wall, but any weight off my feet was worth it.

No longer staggering slightly on the spot, I eyed the hall that I knew led to the planes. The thieves who I'd tricked a few minutes ago seemed to have vanished completely. They must have discovered my deception by now, but they weren't coming back for me. Maybe they'd had another escape route handy, or maybe the gym leaders had called for reinforcements that had managed to intercept them. Either way, that left my path to freedom wide open, so all I needed to do was slowly inch my way over there.

"Oi."

My heart leapt into my throat.

The milotic person was standing right in front of me again, seemingly alone once more. They twirled a full-size Pokéball idly on one finger. The red light on their mask bored into my eyes.

"Get back," I half-shouted, half-croaked, holding up Caligula's Pokéball half-heartedly. She wasn't going to be much use against a milotic, but she was all I had left.

"Whoah, whoah," they said, flipping their Pokéball into their palm and minimizing it. They stowed it underneath their cape and then held their empty palms up, in a show of peace. "Listen, I'm not here to hurt you."

That was hard to believe.

"Now, this might be a weird question, but you look like you might've just been attacked by a girl with a milotic. Were you just attacked by a girl with a milotic?"

"I..." So there were two of them prancing around in that outfit, and the one with the milotic was a girl. "Yeah," I admitted.

"Okay," they said. "And are you going to go back down where she is again?"

I shook my head slowly. It wasn't backing down once you'd already lost.

The masked person nodded. "Good, good. That means that we don't have any problems here."

I hoped he was telling the truth.

"Now, listen. I'm going to send out my blissey, and he's going to heal you. Then you're going to get out of here. I take it that you know about the hole back there?"

I nodded tentatively.

"Good. Now go, Albus!" True to his word, the pokémon that materialized was a blissey. "Heal Pulse on the girl." The blissey inhaled, and then suddenly the warm, sugary sensation of filling my insides with caramel flowed out from my chest. I could almost feel it as the pulse knitted away all the trauma that had my body had gone through, and as it melted away the fog that had been locking my brain up ever since the milotic had attacked me. My glasses hadn't been knocked off my face, I'd had them in my pocket ever since I'd stolen that thief's mask. The thieves must have come back while I was unconscious, only to see me out cold in a puddle of water.

With those two mysteries solved, I turned to inspect the trainer with the blissey, but they were already heading down the stairs.

"Hey!" I shouted down at them. "Why're you going down there?"

They looked back at me. "Just get out of here before you get hurt, kid." They gave me a wave goodbye and continued on their way.

Following their advice did sound pretty tempting. But now that I was fully healed from the dressing-down that the milotic had given me, I had a better plan than crawling to the Pokémon Centre. The gym leader and his buddy. Gym leaders, and anybody who associated with them, were pretty strong trainers, but here there were two really tough people who had been given free rein in the building that the leaders were meant to be defending.

I wanted to know why, and I had a weird feeling that, whatever was going on behind the door that the milotic lady had been defending, it was the main reason for breaking in to this compound in the first place. That meant that whoever was preventing the gym leaders from getting here were just their first line of defence. Which meant that I was positioned to do something to contribute.

Feeling slightly giddy, I broke into a run, relishing the feeling of muscles bunching up and then shooting out as the balls of my feet pounded into the sleek white floor of the building. I galloped straight past the jagged hole that the thieves had left in the building, heading into the half of the building that I hadn't visited yet. More featureless corridors. The occasional windowless white door.

I skidded to a halt at a corner that had been blasted open by some attack, exposing the 'sky' of the compound. Unlike the glimpse I'd been able to catch of it while walking in from the clearing outside, here the whole ceiling had been blasted off, giving me a much clearer view of what was happening. If the hole I'd entered this place through had been at the back of the compound, this place was clearly the front. I pulled my glasses out of my pockets and pressed them on to my face.

At one point, the pile of rubble outside might have been a courtyard. But where there might have been grass and cobblestone paths before, a chaotic mess of puddles of water, scorch marks, and upturned earth lay strewn all over the place. In the midst of it all brawled a horde of pokémon- what I assumed were the nidoking and the blastoise from before were right in the centre of the action, slugging it out with an aggron and a kadabra, but several smaller pokémon darted in and out of vision around them. I identified a crobat just as an errant electric attack shot out from one of the land-bound pokémon beneath it. It began a freefall, clearly unconscious, but then a beam of red light shot out from some source behind all the fighting and hit it, absorbing it. Then, scarcely a second later, another flash of red light lit up the place and the crobat reappeared, seemingly completely healed.

So that was how they'd been fighting for so long. If both sides had access to enough Max potions and full heals, an insane melee like this could last for days on end.

Assuming that the crobat had belonged to the poison-type gym leader, that meant that the bad guys were closer to me, since I kind of doubted that they would just stand next to their opponents and let them heal up their pokémon whenever they wanted. I climbed out of the hole in the building. If I could find the people battling here, I could try and interrupt them with Caligula's help. That would force them to call their pokémon off the gym leaders, to deal with me, giving the good guys a momentary advantage.

I set out over the ruined battlefield, deftly stepping over chunks of masonry and avoiding the puddles where I could. The trainers wouldn't be so close to the fight that getting hit by a rogue attack would be a risk, but they would have to be close enough that their pokémon would be able to hear them over all the combat.

I found what I was looking for when the aggron took a savage blow from the nidoking it was grappling with and needed to be returned. Looked like the beam of light was coming out from behind a small pile of rocks. I grinned and readied Caligula's Pokéball. Since she was so much smaller than me, it wouldn't make sense to release her until I was already on top of whoever was there.

As I neared the outcropping, I circled around a little, hoping to get behind whoever was there. There was just one person there, crouching almost on top of the rocks, dressed in what looked like the same cloak and mask affair as the trainers with the blissey and the milotic, although it was hard to be sure from behind.

I took a deep breath to brace myself, dropped into a sprinter's crouch, and then I made my mad dash for the solitary trainer.

I was already almost on them when they finally heard me coming for him. They just had enough time to turn, revealing another single red eye, before I clocked them in the face and sent out Caligula simultaneously.

"Bulldoze!" I commanded as they reeled backwards onto the boulder in front of them. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, when the boulder stood up.

"Hm?"

First, the boulder picked up the trainer and protectively held them out of my reach with one rocky arm. Then it smashed the ground with the other. I was thrown off my feet by force of the impact, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that Caligula had been thrown into the air. I landed badly, and wheezed, winded, as the air was knocked out of me. When I cracked open my eyes, the other trainer had already recovered, and was standing over me alongside what I now realized was their graveller.

God dammit.

"Pick her up," the trainer said, in the same heavily distorted voice as the other two masks had spoken in. The graveller obliged, slinging me over its shoulder. I struggled in its grasp, raining blows on its rugged back, but didn't manage much besides almost breaking my hands. I was stuck. "Grab the trapinch, too," he added, noticing Caligula a few moments later.

"Bulldoze!" I cried once more, but she just lay limply on the ground and let the graveller scoop her up.

"Your trapinch is unconscious," the trainer informed me. "Now, then. Kadabra, relay the following message to all humans still within this facility: 'We have a hostage. Return all of your pokémon immediately and allow us to restrain you, or we will break her legs.' Then send them an image of myself, Graveller, and the human child as we are currently arranged."

They'd said it to thin air, but shortly a robotic-sounding female voice inside my head repeated the short message. There was a brief, surreal moment as my vision was consumed by an image of myself from the third person, held fast over a graveller's shoulder, and then the message had concluded.

"Excellent." I craned my neck around to see what was happening. Sure enough, some of the pokémon were being returned to their balls as I watched. "Kadabra, take the Pokéballs off the two humans across the field. Ensure that all twelve are accounted for. Then have Aggron lift those humans... onto the roof of that building behind you." I stopped craning my neck to look up at the building I'd just come out of. My heart sank as I saw that its tiled roof was much too high up to safely jump from. The good guys would be stuck up there for now.

An earth-shaking crash reverberated through the courtyard- I could feel it through the graveller holding me. I heard a brief clattering from behind me, and then I gaped as I saw the aggron from before leap up and attach itself to the brick wall of the building ahead, two figures clinging desperately on chinks in its armour. Despite its weight, it clambered up the wall with ease and deposited the humans on the roof, as the trainer holding me captive had instructed. Then it leapt back down, landing with another thunderous crash.

"How the hell did an aggron do _that_?" I blurted.

The trainer didn't answer. They were focused on something underneath their cloak that I couldn't quite see from my current position.

" _The woman attempted to set her Feraligatr on_ _me when I took her P_ _oké_ _balls off her person_ _,_ " intoned the Kadabra's telepathic voice. " _Shall we break the hostage's legs as promised_?"

"No," said the trainer shortly. One of their arms shot out from underneath their cloak and suddenly nine or ten bolts of red light originating from the battlefield behind me soared through the air and collided with his wrist, which I now saw had one of those fancy wrist-mounted Pokéball launchers mounted on it. He pressed a button on the launcher and gestured at the aggron, returning that, too. Then he set off for the building. The graveller carrying me and Caligula lumbered along behind him.

Once we arrived at the original hole that had been blasted into the brick walls of this inner building, they ordered the graveller to put me and my pokémon down. Caligula was still out cold, but maybe I could catch him off guard with my fists.

"If you're planning to try something, don't bother," said the trainer. "We're parting ways here. Return your trapinch and go back to the gym leaders. Help them off the roof, if they haven't got the keys to the service stairwell for some reason. You've done what I needed." He sent out his kadabra once more, returned the graveller, and gave me a sardonic wave. He and the kadabra stepped out into the clearing outside. He reached up to the edge of the gateway and broke it, and then the image of the grassy clearing was filled with a rectangle of solid white. It was spotless, unlike the rest of the walls in this place.

Feeling slightly dazed, I recalled Caligula and wandered slowly back the way we'd came, until I was back in the exposed corner of the building. I stepped back out into the ruined clearing and backed away from the building until I was sure that the two trainers on top of it had vanished- mask number three had referred to them as the gym leaders, plural, meaning that the woman was another gym leader after all. I hadn't recognised the woman at all, but they did change up the roster of gym leaders every few years or so.

Shortly, the two of them burst out from the front door of the building. They noticed me immediately and walked up.

"Did you recover our Pokéballs?" snapped the woman in the pinstriped suit. Her legs were caked in mud and soot, and I noticed that she'd rolled her sleeves up to reveal toned forearms.

"Uh, no," I said, feeling slightly intimidated.

She strode off, muttering about the state of the youth.

The Fennel gym leader stuck his hand out. I looked between it and his face a couple of times before realising that he meant to shake my hand. I reached out and took it, a little nervously.

"Howdy," he said. "Name's Archer. What's yours?"

"Janet. Janet Prosper," I stuttered. "Why are you shaking my hand?"

He shrugged and withdrew his hand. "How did you get in here?"

"The same way the... bad guys did," I said.

He nodded pensively. "So you really _do_ have no idea what's going on here."

"No," I said slowly.

"Well, ask Cara when she gets back," he said, shoving his hands in a pocket in the front of his purple hoodie. "She's more into this fossil business than me."

"Fossil business?"

"Oh look, here she comes now," Archer said quickly.

Cara wore a foul expression on her face as she stormed up to the two of us. A ludicolo meandered along behind her, clutching six Pokéballs in its wide arms.

"Now," Cara declared, turning to me. Without further ado, she grabbed my shirt by the collar and hefted me off my feet- as an adult, she was easily a head taller than me, and she was muscular. "You've got some fucking explaining to do, punk. How did you get in here?"

Without thinking, I punched her in the face. She reared backwards, and I swiftly realised my mistake when she dropped me. I landed flat on my back and gasped in pain, thoroughly winded for the third time that day.

"That's IT!" howled Cara. "This whole day has been nothing but one long fuck-up and I am DONE with all of you! Archer, do your job for once in your _fucking_ life and handle this!" She clicked her tongue at her ludicolo. It dropped the pokéballs in its arms and picked her up, then waddled off in the direction of the building. The effect of her little outburst had been ruined a little by the ridiculous exit, but I wasn't in any hurry to point that out until she was well out of earshot.

Archer, to my left, sighed and scooped up the Pokéballs that her ludicolo had dropped. I assumed that those were his. "What a bitch," he commented.

"So, uh, what happens now?" I asked him, having recovered from my fall somewhat. "Do you interrogate me?"

"It's already kinda obvious what happened. You saw me and Cara heading out of the gym all fast-like, and then you did the classic meddling kid routine and followed us. Then you beat up the dumb muscle that the bad guys left outside, got into the building, did some stupid shit for six hours, and then tried to play hero for us."

He didn't sound bitter about that last part, but I still felt my face grow hot with shame as I remembered how that had backfired horribly.

"Anyway, I somehow doubt you picked up any valuable intel, so-"

"They were doing something in the building," I said. "Like, there was this huge door that one of them was guarding. With this huge milotic that could turn invisible."

"Hm?" Archer's interest had been piqued.

"I could show you where," I told him.

He sighed. "Fine. Show away."

I led him through the halls of the first floor of the building. When we reached the first staircase, he whistled when he saw the crater in the ceiling that had been left by me and Fang earlier. The crater from getting Hydro Pumped halfway to death.

"That you?" he asked.

"Uh, kind of," I said.

He looked pleased enough with that, so I didn't elaborate any further. We continued down the stairs, retracing my path through the cavernous grey halls of the next floor. When we walked past the solitary door down here- the room that the thieves had been raiding earlier- a strange look crossed his face. Not quite fear or worry, but I couldn't think of anything else that would be an appropriate response there.

Then we hit the last staircase. Or at least, where the last staircase had been. Right now it was sealed up with a massive plug of ice, so thick as to be totally opaque.

"Frozen solid," noted Archer, giving the ice a probing feel with his left foot. He rammed his heel into it, to no effect.

"What now?"

Archer shrugged and started walking back the way we'd come. I followed him. "Not much we can do. My skuntank knows flamethrower, but it'll take her a long while to burn through that, especially if it's filling up the whole bloody corridor. Everyone in on this place knows what's supposed to be down there, so I'll just ring it in and we'll see what's been taken in a week or so."

"So... that's it?" I frowned. "The bad guys win?"

"Today, yeah," nodded Archer.

That left a bad taste in my mouth.

"Anyway," he continued. "The most important thing here is that you tell nobody about this. Not your mum, not your dad, not even your watchog."

"What?"

He clapped a hand on my shoulder. "This whole facility. It's a secret, and it's gotta stay that way. Do you understand me?"

"Why?"

"Government stuff. We don't want another incident like this happening ever again."

That was... disheartening. So this was a top secret research facility or something, and I'd just been able to stroll right in on the coattails of some crazy criminals?

"Okay," I said, finally. "I won't say anything."

"Peachy," Archer said.

* * *

Leaving the compound turned out to be a matter of entering the control room and entering a passcode into a teleportation pad. I knew that the technology was mostly outdated, but from behind a control panel Archer assured me that it was perfectly fine.

"It'll just take us back to my gym. It's already past closing time for me, but you can heal up your pokémon inside and I'll throw in a battle with you. My treat, alright?" He flipped a couple of switches, pressed a button, and then rushed out from behind the controls to get on to the pad alongside me. I experienced the unsettling sensation of feeling every atom in my body vibrate for a second, and then we arrived at the gym. We were in a room that reminded me of a supply closet, but roomier. The walls were lined wireframe shelves covered in junk, and stacks of cardboard boxes and various mops and brooms. Everything was covered in a thin layer of dust.

Archer sprung off the pad the moment he could, and began pacing around it, clutching his two weird hair spikes. Tiny clouds of dust followed in his wake.

"Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ," he chanted.

"What's wrong?" I asked. Had something gone wrong in the teleportation process?

"The technicians," he gabbled. "I was like it's kind of inconvenient that I had to set a timer and then run for the pad but I didn't realise why because I never use the teleporter when I have the doors on hand oh my god they must have the technicians."

"The... technicians?"

He'd pulled out a Pokédex and was clutching it to his ear. "Yes, the lab technicians, the ones working on the stupid machines in that stupid laboratory! Now shut up, I'm calling- oh, yo, Trissa!"

Completely ignored, I watched as he spoke into the phone. It wasn't a perfect one-eighty from his fury just now, but he was definitely more the extremely nervous subordinate when he was talking to this 'Trissa' person.

"Listen, has Cara already called you about the break-in? At Eden?"

This was probably making me even more of a security risk than I already was.

"Okay, well, there was a break-in. Some assholes in masks and cloaks. Shut down the security systems somehow, I dunno."

The door was right behind me. I should probably just leave.

"Don't ask _me_ what they wanted, I'm not the fucking criminal!"

I stayed where I was.

"Ok, sorry that was out of line. Sorry."

It wasn't like I was learning anything I didn't already know here.

"Anyway so look, they did something in Room 1 while a couple of them stalled us outside. We don't know what because they froze over the whole corridor, but it definitely wasn't good. And... they've kidnapped all the techs."

The response to that last tidbit must have been screamed through the phone, because I could hear the burst of sound all the way from where I was standing. Archer wrenched the Pokédex away from his skull and savagely pressed the hang-up button.

"That did not go well," he said to nobody in particular. Then he seemed to remember that I was still standing in front of him. "Fuck. Look, just... try to forget literally everything that you heard today." His Pokédex started ringing in his hand. He rejected the call. It started ringing again. He threw the dex aside and strode forwards.

"Come on," he called over his shoulder as he pushed open a door that I hadn't seen amidst all the junk in the room. "Let's have a battle to take my mind off things."

I followed him into a huge room that reminded me of Allspice Academy's indoor gymnasium. Two sets of bleachers sat alongside the long walls, and I saw an inert scoreboard on the short wall at the far end of the room. The floor was simple, dry dirt. White lines drawn on top of it showed what the boundaries of the pitch were.

So this was the main gym. Archer passed me a battered-looking tray with two rows of three hemispherical indentations in it. Looked like I was meant to put my Pokéballs in it, which meant that this was probably his personal healing device. I stuck Fang and Caligula in there, and after a couple of seconds of thought decided not to heal the lileep. I hadn't used it at all today, and I wasn't going to use it for this battle either. Besides, I was pretty sure that Archer would figure out that something was up if I pulled out a ball that looked exactly like the ones in his top-secret facility.

Archer took the tray back and pressed a button on its side. We waited a couple of seconds, then he took the Pokéballs back out and passed them back to me.

"So, you're on zero badges right now, right?" he asked me, as he sauntered up to the far end of the gym.

"Yes!" I shouted across the gym.

He nodded and, upon reaching the back wall, pulled aside a panel that revealed a desktop computer attached to what looked like a Pokémon Centre trading machine. Sure enough, he stuck two of his balls into one of the machine's arms and then fiddled with the computer a little. Then the machine's other arm spat two other balls out into his waiting hand.

"This is a two-on-two single battle with no time limit," Archer declared. "Only the challenger may withdraw pokémon without penalty! Any pokémon that is knocked out or is forced to leave the boundaries of the field is ineligible to battle! Three- two- one! Go, Venipede!"

I smirked and expanded Caligula's ball. This was a foe suited to my Bulldoze strategy. "Go, Caligula!"

My trapinch exploded onto the battlefield in a burst of light. "Bulldoze!"

"Defense Curl, Rollout, up!" ordered Archer. His venipede curled up into a ball and, before Caligula's attack could reach it, shot into the air, clearing the Bulldoze with ease. It bounced down on the fresh dirt and then sped towards Caligula.

"Bite!" I said. Caligula's jaws swung open and she stood there, waiting for the venipede to hit her.

"Poison Sting!" The venipede stopped dead in its tracks and fired a volley of bright purple spikes out. The attack struck home, hitting my trapinch in the vulnerable inside of her mouth.

That had been a good strategy, I admitted as Caligula whined and closed her mouth. Bait out the Bite, only to take the window it presented to deal some real damage.

"Bulldoze!" I snapped. Caligula stomped down on the ground, her injury forgotten, and this time the venipede was far too close to her to evade it. It was flung back.

Although it managed to land on its feet, I could see that the attack had stung by its sluggish response to Archer's next command. "Poison Sting! Rollout nine o'clock!"

Purple needles sprayed out from the venipede's head again, but without enough force to make it all the way to Caligula. The venipede curled up and shot out at an oblique angle, widening the distance between the two pokémon.

Caligula was far too slow to catch up to the venipede in order to successfully Bite it, but I knew that the venipede had to come back into her threat range if it wanted to do any damage.

"Bulldoze!" I commanded again. Another circular wave of debris pulsed along the ground.

"Rollout three o'clock!"

This time, the venipede spun straight through the wave of dirt, ignoring it completely. Rollout got stronger the more times it was used in succession, and it looked like the venipede no longer needed to go over the wave to get past it.

"Bite!"

Archer smirked at that. He thought I hadn't learned my lesson. But the venipede was bearing down on Caligula swiftly, and at any second Archer would stop it for a Poison Sting...

"Poi-" Before he'd even finished his order, I was giving my own. "- son Sting!"

"Sand Tomb!"

A mass of dirt, thicker and coarser than the dirt that made up the gym floor, materialized in front of Caligula's wide open maw and hurled itself at the venipede mid-Poison Sting. The resulting collision threw the venipede back and, after a brief fight with gravity, it surrendered and collapsed on its back, unconscious.

A beam of red light hit it, withdrawing it from the battle. "Nicely done," Archer commended me. "Go, Zubat!"

A zubat came fluttering out of the ball. A poison/flying hybrid that was practically unheard of in this region, I mostly knew of its existence on account of the many top-ranked trainers who had returned from other regions with one of its evolutions, golbat or crobat. Crobat in particular were prized for their speed and impressive physical power, in addition to being surprisingly resilient for flying-types.

"Return, Caligula," I said. "Go, Fang!"

While Sand Tomb had some range to it, I doubted it would reach a flying-type that was trying to stay out of her range. Fang's Poison Sting and superior lunge range were a surer bet, and his size meant that the zubat would have a tough time making any headway against him without getting in close.

"Supersonic!" ordered Archer. The zubat held still in its mad fluttering for a moment to fire off a burst of sound that visibly warped the air it passed through. The attack went wide, and then it was time for my counterattack.

"Glare!" I shouted. Guaranteed paralysis was a potent tool, especially against a pokémon so reliant on its mobility. My arbok's single eye glowed bright red. The zubat halted again, almost looking as if it was about to fall to the earth and lose then and there, but it managed to right itself.

"Supersonic!" Archer said again.

I watched as it somehow managed to kick up a cloud of dirt even further away from Fang than the last one. Was Supersonic his only ranged attack?

"Poison Sting!" Fang sprayed a hail of glowing needles at his opponent.

"Dodge it!" The zubat attempted to lurch out of the way of the incoming attack, but it didn't get far enough to escape it completely- a couple of needles pierced its skin, making it cry out. Even if the attack didn't do much damage to a fellow poison-type, every bit counted.

I paused for a bit, expecting Archer to order another Supersonic, but it seemed that he'd given up on that strategy and was now watching me with a suspiciously shrewd expression.

"Go for a Bite!" I shouted at Fang. He coiled up for a second- I could see the muscles bunching up under his scales- and then he shot into the air, mouth wide open.

Archer shouted something too fast for me to hear, but the zubat floated back a little and unleashed its Supersonic. This time, with Fang almost on top of it, the attack scored a clean hit, and Fang dropped to the ground, eye spinning wildly and his body convulsing.

No problem, I thought to myself. "Return! Go, Caligula! Return! Go, Fang!" In an instant, the effects of the zubat's attacks had been erased. Fang reared up and hissed triumphantly at Archer and his half-crippled pokémon, clearly goading them.

Archer sighed and recalled his zubat, signalling the end of the battle. Looked like he'd been hoping that I didn't know that recalling a pokémon cured the confusion status, unlike most other statuses that could be afflicted on a pokémon.

"Well done," he said once I'd recalled Fang and walked over to his side of the gym. "I'm guessing you're the type who wants the physical badges?"

I nodded, scarcely daring to believe that I'd just won my first badge. He hadn't been a _pushover_ , but it looked like his pokémon were a lot weaker than mine had been. The restrictions for gym leaders at the 0th badge level probably hadn't accounted for trainers who had gotten a few days of training in before their first gym battle.

He stuck his hand in his pocket and extracted a purple piece of plastic that resembled a stylised plant of some kind. "That's the Stalk Badge. The name'd make more sense if you'd come here at a higher level, but... I can't fault you for accepting a good matchup when you see it."

Proudly, I accepted it and stowed it safely in my pocket, next to the lileep's Pokéball. I would be spending some time studying both tonight.

"You're really serious about this, huh," Archer commented as we shook each other's hands.

"Uh, yeah," I agreed. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Archer shrugged. "I wouldn't know."


	7. Interlude 1: Poképsych 207

**10/25/1973**

 **Poképsychology Module 207E005**

 **Theories of Pokécognition**

 **DARWINIAN SCHIZOCOGNITION**

 **Introduction**

Now that we've established a foundation of knowledge regarding both the studies and the scientific jargon that tend to be employed in the field of Applied Pokécognition, we can begin to delve deeper into the theories that can help us get in touch with our monstrous friends. This lesson will cover the main arguments favoured by the genius naturalist and artist Miles Darwin, whose work you may have already covered in lesson 205 of this very course, depending on which module you selected.

 **Background**

Darwin's primary insight was that the consciousness of pokémon was just as rational and empirically testable as the consciousness of human beings. However, he additionally argued that, no matter how rational a pokémon's mind was, there are two fundamental differences in the ways that humans and pokémon think, differences that to this day we remember as the aptly named Darwin's Pair.

 **Darwin's Pair**

The first difference cited in Darwin's Pair, and the one most commonly subject to public misconception, is that pokémon compartmentalize their schemas in a way that allows entire spheres of their own consciousness to coexist without ever once interacting. While the common understanding is that this half of Darwin's Pair explains why pokémon are capable of learning discrete moves that consist of large numbers of smaller muscle movements and energy transitions (by creating "bundled" schema that rarely or never interact with the "bundles" that comprise other moves), the truth is at once much more nuanced and far more alien to the human mind than this. According to Darwin, pokémon do not merely compartmentalize patterns of behaviour such as moves with this mechanism inherent to their cognition. In fact, they can, and do, compartmentalize emotional states and specific cognitive abilities as well. This allows them to deactivate their empathy and emotional centres at will, and in fact almost all species of pokémon inherit the specific configuration of cognitive bundles required to manage this ability from birth. The most common application of this theory of bundles is found in "superbundles", formed when patterns from many different bundles are merged into one. These superbundles are used more frequently and will support a wider breadth of skills and schemas than their simpler counterparts, but take sustained effort from both pokémon and trainer to develop. We will revisit this topic shortly.

For those interested in or taking the related course in Pokémon Biology at university level, it may be fruitful to draw connections between this principle of pokécognition and the biological theory of Energy Writ Manifest as proposed, in various forms, by thinkers ranging from Idus Aristophanes to Bracille Curie. Just as the body freely converts raw energy into mass at the physical locations in a pokémon's physical form appropriate to what the pokémon hopes to accomplish, the mind will deploy resources towards the regions of the pokémon's cognition that will make it most willing to complete its goals.

The second half of Darwin's Pair is somewhat less prone to misunderstanding, if only because few schools will ever even explore its ramifications in depth. What is never learned is never misunderstood, as Darwin once said. This difference accounts for the willingness for pokémon to follow the orders of their trainers, and their otherwise inexplicable ability to comprehend all human languages currently known to Eastern civilisation, even without any formal education or training process. Darwin's original formulation of this rule, as related in his original journals on the subject of pokécognition- "what is thought, becomes"-, is perhaps the most to-the-point description of the general idea behind the rule, but it clearly lacks far too much clarity or even context to be of any use to a student sitting an exam on this subject. It would be perhaps more prudent- if not necessarily more correct- to expand the statement into the less ambiguous "pokémon take upon the goals and mannerisms of their trainers". This idea would later take root in the mind of the great Pokémon Professor, Samuel Oak, and serve as the basis of his extensive theory of poké-human symbiosis.

 **Oak and Darwin**

Despite the fact that much of Oak's initial induction into the world of pokémon academia was founded on the works of Darwin and naturalists that followed in his tradition, Oak actively rejects many of the more disturbing facets of Darwin's theories, including Darwin's Pair. He takes particular umbrage to Darwin's claim that pokémon are naturally predisposed to vacillation between hyperaggressive and hyperpassive states, pointing out that pokémon rarely engage in violent conflict with each other in the absence of human influences such as pollution or, more directly, orders to battle.

However, in other respects Oak builds on Darwin's Pair, a pattern that is perhaps best exemplified in his work with schizocognition in pokémon. During his tremendously successful Pokédex Project, a massive-scale observational study that catalogued the physiological and emotional states of hundreds of thousands of trained pokémon across two regions and several years, he found that bundles related to combat and bundles related to social feedback mechanisms consistently began to replicate themselves after only hours of training with a sufficiently engaged human to guide their steps. The duration of a trained pokémon's career was found to become an excellent predictor for the number of superbundles that a pokémon would ultimately develop, as was the aggregated skill level of the trainer themselves. Essentially, spending more time with a more skilled trainer will make a pokémon much more flexible in its cognition than it was before, until the pokémon has amalgamated almost all of its social and strategic cognitive patterns in a single mode of thought. This is what Oak describes as the phenomenon of "unicognition", and sees as the ultimate goal of any long-term partnership between human and pokémon.


	8. Futile Prospects

When I got back to the Pokécentre, ready for a large (and nutritionally balanced) dinner, I found both the main lobby and the cafeteria packed with a huge number of trainers- certainly more than I had thought were even in Fennel Town at the time. I didn't recognise anybody as I was walking in, but once I'd sorted out my meal and looked for a space to eat, someone caught my attention.

"Janet! Over here!" said... Fergie Mach? It was something like that.

I recognised his bushy orange hair and chubby freckled face, even if I couldn't remember his name, and I figured that if he'd been so kind as to save a seat for me I might as well make use of it... even if it was on a table that was more or less packed. I awkwardly pushed my way past benches packed with trainers locked in deep conversation and finally made it next to him.

"Hey," I said by way of greeting. "What's the big deal?"

"What's the big deal?" Fangle repeated, gaping incredulously. "What rock were you hiding under?"

I was about to tell him, when I remembered Archer's request. "Getting my gym badge, dumbass."

He made a derisive noise. "Ha, no way. Archer's been out all day- I would know!"

"She's telling the truth," said a third person.

I blinked. Amanda was sitting right next to him. I'd missed her the crush of trainers all around us.

"Oh come on!" griped Foible. "How do you even know?"

She held up her Pokédex. "Trainer tracker. We're all official trainers now, even if right now we haven't done anything notable."

Sure enough, my online profile's Stalk Badge icon was lit up.

Feeble groaned again and shoved one of the three burgers on his plate into his mouth. "Were oo jush ay-ing fo him choo um bad oushide hidge gym?"

I didn't understand a word he was saying. "What?"  
"I think he means, 'were you just waiting for him to come back outside his gym'," Amanda suggested nonchalantly.

"Uh," that was really unflattering but I had to keep where I'd really been secret, "yeah! Duh! I trained against a bunch of... pidove. While I was waiting."

Fairy chortled through his burger. I tried to meet Amanda's eye, but she was staring at her Pokédex once more.

Once Fistful had managed to finish his burger, he took a break from stuffing his face to continue our conversation. "Anyway, yeah. Lotta stuff happening today. Apparently, a bunch of terrorists are holding the Academy hostage!"

"The Academy?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, with a nod. "Allspice Academy."

"Hostage?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, picking up his next burger. "Like with threats and everything."

"Huh," I said.

Amanda chose that moment to roll her eyes and rejoin the conversation. "I knew she wouldn't care."

Friggle looked at her sideways. "It's not like you-"

"Oh shut up," I cut in. "The big girls are talking, Furry. You were saying, Amanda?"

She looked taken aback for a moment. "Did you not understand what I just said?"

"I... think I did," I said, suddenly unsure. Had she meant something else? "You said I didn't care about Allspice Academy, right? Well, you're right. It sucks."

"Holy crap," Amanda groaned. She laid her forehead on her hands and started massaging her temples. "I wasn't gonna do this stupid 'rival' thing, but you're making it _really_ hard for me."

"You're gonna be my rival?" I exclaimed, the idea pushing out every other thought from my head.

"I don't think-"

"Shut it, Foxtrot," I snapped. "This is a matter between _winners_."

He gaped at me. "Wha- what- _Foxtrot_?- and what do you mean, _winners_?"

It was my turn to roll my eyes. Here I was, thinking that anyone could at least grasp the very basics of pokémon training, and of _course_ this guy didn't get them. How would he, with his knock-off starter and diet for losers?

"Look," I said impatiently. "You can be awesome and wreck face like me and Amanda, or you can suck. Like you."

That didn't shut his mouth. If anything, his jaw dropped even further. "Is... is this for real?" he croaked at Amanda out of the side of his mouth.

"Yes," said Amanda coldly. "She is." She raised her arm and pointed at me, almost accusingly. I wasn't sure why. "I've gotten stronger since Allspice," she said, addressing me alone now. "Battle me."

"Yes, sounds awesome. Now?" I thought for a second. "So is this it? We're rivals now?" I asked, wanting clear confirmation.

"If you win this," Amanda said, "I'll be your god damn rival."

"Awesome, so-"

"But if I win it," she continued, "You'd better stop with all this winner nonsense."

I squinted at her. "What?"

"You'll apologise to Fergus, and stop splitting the world into winners and losers. Forever. And you'll get his name right for once."

"O... kay." Those terms sounded kind of nonsensical, but it didn't matter what she wanted anyway. I would just win this, and then she'd be my official rival! I couldn't wait.

"But first," she said, "Fergus should go get his gym badge."

He paused in the middle of stuffing his next burger in his mouth. At least he'd spontaneously developed the decency to take it out of his mouth before trying to talk this time. "What? Archer was- oh, right." He made as if to resume stuffing his burger in his mouth, but Amanda slapped it out of his hand.

"Aw, come on!" he grunted as it fell sloppily onto his trouser leg. "How'm I gonna eat that now?"

"You aren't," Amanda said dangerously.

"Now hurry up," I chimed in. I was already standing, having finished my meal in record time since Amanda had first brought up rivalries. The reason was obvious- all of the greats, for all their differences, had all had one thing in common: a badass rival behind them, supporting their ascent to Championship through relentless adversity. Lance had Faerin, Hale had Cessarium, and even the top dog himself- the mysterious Red- had 'Blue'. Securing a rival who was destined to become almost as great as me was just another item on the big checklist of becoming Regional Champion.

As it turned out, the gym was a bust; Archer closed up every day at 1800 hours, and it was already nine. Amanda gave me a sideways look as we read the notice attached to the inside of the gym's glass door, but Fergus just growled and kicked a pebble on the street.

"Just my luck," he muttered, half to himself.

"Whatever," I said. "It'll be open in the morning."

"Yeah," Amanda said with a nod. "So that you can get your badge _between_ the hours of 0800 and 1800."

Both Fergus and I accepted the unnecessary elaboration without comment.

"Unlike certain people here," she added.

I adjusted my classes and pulled out my Pokédex. "Get to the point," I yawned. "I've had a busy day."

"Yeah, a busy day," Amanda said. "I guess checking the time all day really took a lot out of you, huh."

She sounded weirdly sarcastic.

"I... wasn't. Doing that. I was doing something else," I said, not sure if I was correcting her or sounding like an idiot. Whatever, Ferris Wheel wasn't even paying attention at this point.

Judging by the movement of her hands and mouth, she was halfway between wanting to throttle me and wanting to grin and shout about something.

"Oh whatever," she said eventually, her hands flopping to her sides and her face falling back into her usual unimpressed expression. "I've got a migraine now, so let's do the battle tomorrow."

I wasn't exactly pleased about the delay, but I did have to admit that it would give me enough time to get properly acquainted with my newest teammate.

"Fine," I said.

"At seven," she added.

"Six," I said.

"Uh, okay," she said, surprised but not necessarily unpleasantly so. That meant she was used to waking up early. Which, well, it was obvious since she was a winner, like me, but that left me with a question.

I... I had a feeling it would be another Fergus moment, but... "Um, were you on the track team at school?"

"No," Amanda said. "Why, were you?"

"Y... no."

"Oh my god," Amanda said. "You were and you didn't even know who the other members _were_."

"Well why should I have," I said defensively. "I was always at the front, nobody else even came close to me."

"Winners and losers," Amanda said disdainfully, shaking her head.

" _Exactly_ ," I said, almost laughing in relief. She got it after all.

It almost seemed like she was going to say something else, but she broke it off before she could do anything more substantial than inhaling. Maybe her migraine was acting up. "Look, I'm just going to go to bed now. See you guys. Fergus, you'll be up to watch us battle, right?"

Fergus grunted non-committally from his spot on the edge of the pavement, still staring glumly at his feet.

"Uh, Amanda, you're going the wrong way," I pointed out.

She ignored me and continued in the direction she had chosen. That had to be one hell of a migraine. I shrugged it off- she'd end up in the Centre sooner or later- and started on my own way, heading in the _right_ direction.

When at last I arrived, I headed straight for my room, deciding to pass up a shower. All the action today had made my outfit, and body, rather grimy, but it was also catching up to me in terms of fatigue. I was pretty sure I'd read somewhere that pokémon healing wasn't meant to be effective beyond the very short term, so maybe that was a factor too, although I didn't remember seeing anything about being _more_ tired out after getting healed like that. Then again, remembering the punishment I'd taken from that milotic, I could see why it might work that way. I grimaced and tried to stop thinking about what had happened at that stupid compound.

The room I'd been provided with was reasonably large- big enough for me to release all three members of my current team if I wanted to, but probably not sufficient for a full team of fully evolved pokémon unless they were all unusually small species like raichu or zangoose. I slipped the badge from my pocket and admired it for a little. Even if it was just plastic, the detail work that went into each purple leaf-thingy- frond?- on the stalk was self-evident. Just another reason that having physical copies of the badges were way better than just being happy with digital ones.

I pinned the badge safely on the inside of one of the pouches in my bag. Then I pulled out the green ball that had been in my pocket with the badge- the one with the 'lileep' inside it- and idly tossed it up and down in one hand as I contemplated what to do. First, I decided, I would release its contents and get a good look at it; no point doing this outside, since the pictures I'd seen so far had already made it pretty clear that it was small enough for this room.

I pressed the release button and watched the lileep form. It looked pretty much identical to the few pictures I'd been able to find earlier- a lumpy purple base, a flexible yellow stalk/neck thing, and then a huge purple 'head' ringed by pink petals. The dex had said that it was a rock and grass type, a combination that I'd never heard of before. That should give it some interesting defensive properties, and without any glaring double weaknesses either.

To my surprise, the lileep purred at me when it noticed me, and scurried over to me on its stumpy legs. I stiffened as it wrapped its fronds around my leg, ready to kick it away the moment it turned violent, but it just sat there, rubbing my leg with its weird appendages and making a really weird sound.

So my most affectionate pokémon so far was the faceless plant-rock. Okay. I took out my Pokédex, trying to ignore the lileep on my leg, and opened up the 'party' menu. The lileep was a female. I looked back at it- her- and momentarily wondered how something like that could be a girl _or_ a boy, but it probably wasn't worth thinking about.

I pressed on the name field and said, "Para," into the dex. "That's your name," I told her.

The lileep reared back and covered her two glowy eye-dots with her petals, incidentally taking them off my leg in the process. Then she started bouncing her head up and down. Was that... happiness? This thing was so weird. I returned her and thought about going back outside, but in the dark it would be kind of tedious trying to find something to fight in a place where I could actually see what it was going on... and I could still remember that chaotic fight against Fang three nights ago.

No, I would just try to get some training with her in the morning, stealing away about an hour's worth of it before I had my showdown with Amanda. This was going to be awesome.

The next morning, it was straight out of the Centre at 5:00 AM, after a quick shower and an even quicker Aggranola bar- the Pokécentre's cafeteria wouldn't open for another hour and a half. Then I set out for Route 015, for a spot of quick training, setting an alarm for 5:45 so that I would have enough time to get back to the centre and pick up Amanda for our battle at 6:00. I might have picked Route 013 as my training spot, but after all the chaos that had happened near there yesterday, I wasn't going to spend any more time than I absolutely had to on that route.

Of course, two minutes after I arrived at 015, Amanda strolled up as I was in the middle of pounding a sentret with Para's Ancient Power.

"Oh," she said, seeing what I was doing. "Great." Hastily, I recalled Para, hoping that Amanda hadn't been able to get a clear view of her before the battle had even started.

"Ha," I laughed. Looked like I was the first one up.

She did what I was quickly learning was her favourite reaction to anything- rolling her eyes- and unclipped one of the _five_ pokéballs on her belt. "Fergus probably isn't going to be able to make it at six, so now's as good a time as any. Let's just get this over with."

"I couldn't agree more," I said, pulling out one of my own. She already knew about Caligula, so I didn't want to open with her, and I wanted to keep Para for a point when she needed to choose something to switch into it. That left Fang.

"It's a three-on-three battle with no boundaries and no time limit," I called out. "Now come on out, Fang!"

"Go, Nelson!" Amanda said. Our Pokéballs erupted with light at the same time, discharging our respective pokémon on to the field of us. My arbok stood- well, slithered- against a tranquill.

Amanda gawked at my pokémon. "You _evolved_ it? Already?"

"Yeah," I said, relishing in the momentary shock I'd given her.

"And it's- oh god its eye- what the hell!"

I jabbed my finger at the tranquill. "Enough talk! Bite attack, Fang!"

Fang bounced forwards; the tranquill had foolishly elected not to take flight, remaining within easy striking distance of my arbok. Before the Bite could land, however, a beam of red light struck Amanda's tranquill, converting it back into energy and whisking it from the jaws of my pokémon.

"What the hell?" That was Amanda.

"What the _hell_?" That was me.

"You- that arbok! What the hell was that?"

I flung my hands in the air. "I dunno! You tell me, you anticlimactic moron!"

"Anti- this isn't a god damn TV show, Janet," Amanda growled. She'd quite lost her composure at this point. Her knuckles were white as she clutched her tranquill's pokéball.

"Duh!" I snapped. "I figured that one out when this arbok almost killed me!"

"When _you_ almost killed _it_ , you- you pokémon abuser!"

I almost felt everything- the wind, the clouds, the pokémon, the two of us- grind to a halt. "What did you just call me?" I whispered.

Her face went white as she frantically backpedalled and tried to stutter something coherent at me.

"What the _fuck_ did you just call me?"

One moment, I was standing at one end of a makeshift battlefield, Fang lying lazily in between me

and Amanda. The next, Fang was wrapped around the both of us, hissing viciously as I hefted Amanda bodily into the air, one-handed. I wound my free arm- my _right_ arm- back. Closed the hand into a fist.

"JANET!" screamed Amanda.

She'd been gabbling the whole time, but the red haze covering my vision suddenly splintered with the sound of my name. The pieces came clattering to the ground in my head and I suddenly realised what I was about to do. I dropped her immediately, and Fang sloughed himself off from us like a snake's shed skin

I found myself crawling backwards from Amanda, on my hands and feet with my face to the sky. "Oh fuck, oh god," I chanted under my breath, throat tighter than I'd ever felt it, still barely able to see the enormity of what I'd just done, what I'd tried to do. I didn't _want_ to. I collapsed once I'd crawled as fast as I'd been able to.

We spent a few minutes sobbing on the dirt, lying in the light of dawn.

At one point, Amanda choked out something that sounded like the bark of an order, eliciting a sharp hiss from Fang- I propped myself up on an arm to take aim, and returned the arbok into his ball. He'd still been lying where I'd lifted Amanda. I guessed that once his trainer had backed down, he hadn't seen any reason to do anything else.

That was... good of him, I supposed.

I could feel my heartbeat and breathing slow as I lay there, in the field, alone. I felt my face- damp with snot and tears. I grimaced and wiped it off on my forearm, then wiped that against a tuft of grass sticking out of the arid soil. Looked at the time. It was still only 5:24. We'd only been here for a few minutes, and we were a pair of sobbing wrecks.

Everywhere near Fennel Town _sucked_.


	9. Fighting Problems

We returned from our 'battle' in a surly silence, walking together only because we happened to be heading in the same direction- to the Pokémon Centre. Instead of walking alongside her, I made sure to cross the road and walk across the street from her all the way back. In such a small town and at such an early hour, there wasn't any traffic to stop me.

We stepped into our separate rooms without acknowledging one another. For some reason, our rooms were right next door... she must've arrived here an hour or so ahead of me, since that was about how far ahead of me she was in Marma Forest.

In the safety of my room, I took the opportunity to decompress and _scream_. After a few seconds of that, someone on the floor below gave me a thump through their ceiling and shouted something that I assumed was a variation on 'shut up', so I did. The scream had mostly served its purpose by then, anyway.

... I hadn't even known that there was a second floor of dormitories here.

"I'm taking a shower," I shouted through the wall, grabbing a towel and a change of clothes from the room's closet. I hadn't had time to do my hair earlier, but now that I had an hour to kill until breakfast... well.

The carpeted hall was deserted when I stepped out. She'd gotten the message.

* * *

Feeling refreshed and revitalised, I emerged from my long shower as a changed woman.

Amanda wasn't worthy of being my rival. She might have caught a lot of pokémon by now, but she didn't even have a gym badge, and she hadn't even properly battled me yet. Just forfeited twice.

I would just have to be a bit more patient. Enter some unofficial tournaments. I'd heard that they were good ways of getting your hands on some prize money, which I could use to get luxury items for my journey instead of just subsisting on the bare necessities- luxury items like Dusk balls and teleport sticks.

I walked up to the cafeteria, then thought better of it. Fergus was standing at the door. Before I could abscond to my room, though, he'd already caught sight of me.

"Hey," he called out, seeming more subdued than usual. "What happened out there?"

"What happened out where?" I asked, feigning ignorance.

"I just saw Amanda the most pissed off I've ever seen her," he told me. "Or the saddest, it's kind of hard to tell. What'd you guys _do_?"

"We... battled," I said. "I won."

My Pokédex had actually registered the battle as a victory in my favour, although I'd only gotten 2 points from it. I wasn't _technically_ lying.

Fergus squinted at me, but eventually he shrugged. "Fine," he said. "Are you gonna tag along to watch me finally battle Archer?"

"Nah. I've got things to do," I said.

I half-expected him to get whiny about that too, but he took it in stride. "Whatever," he said. "See you around, I guess."

I really hoped not. The guy sucked. He'd probably lose to Archer and have to spend another day in Fennel Town. I didn't say as much, but he probably got the message, because he grimaced and stalked off without another word.

Not wanting to devote even one more thought to the guy, I pushed the door open and made straight for the food line. This morning I was due for some vitamins, which I scooped up in the form of a fruit salad. Fang was probably too large for the Centre by this point, and I wasn't really sure if lileep even had mouths yet, so I settled for releasing Caligula onto the table and offering her a slice of mango. She docilely accepted it.

According to my biology classes, pokémon in captivity didn't actually _need_ to eat at all; it was more of a leisure activity for them, a more enjoyable way to get the nutrients they needed to repair their bodies than potions and healing machines. Anyone with half a brain could read between the lines there- if you wanted your pokémon to like you, you needed to eat with them every now and then.

"Alright, Caligula," I addressed the trapinch sitting in front of me. She responded to the sound of my voice by cocking her earthy head. "We're heading down to Cayenne now. It's a bigger city than Allspice, and the jungle there has much cooler pokémon than Marma Forest did, so we might be there for a while."

Caligula gurgled randomly. Startled, I reached for her Pokéball, ready to return her and get her checked by the nurses, but in a couple of seconds she stopped and resumed watching me in stoic silence.

I frowned and took out my Pokédex instead, to search for the keywords 'trapinch gurgling'. This was a chance to look up the diet of lileep too; with all those scientific journals on the species, there was surely something on the topic.

There was nothing about trapinch, which I guessed meant Caligula was fine, but there was a wealth of studies into the appropriate diets for lileep. Weirdly, there wasn't anything on the actual Pokédex entry for lileep (which was usually where the authorities put the easy-to-read, finalised information necessary for raising a pokémon), so I had to actually pick a study and read it. I chose the top-ranked study, obviously, and found that lileep had an inexplicable love of red meat. I wasn't sure what made it 'inexplicable', but it was good enough for me. I retrieved a plate of bacon from the front of the cafeteria and released Para onto the table, managing to aim the beam from her ball so that she landed right next to Caligula.

I watched for a couple of seconds as the strips of bacon vanished into the forest of petals at her head, but the sight quickly became unsettling and I looked away until the sounds of slurping died out. When I looked back, the plate was spotless.

"Eep!" purred Para, bouncing her head up and down again like she had last night. I shrugged and returned her and Caligula, and then I picked up my bag and strode out of the cafeteria. The TV in the lobby had been turned on, and it was currently showing scenes of destruction that I guessed were from Allspice Academy. It was lucky that we'd all left before that attack had happened, I thought idly.

Then a very familiar face appeared on the screen.

Alena Hale, current Champion of the Zan League, was standing in front of the Allspice Pokémon Centre. A Pokémon Centre that I'd _been_ in, five days ago. Though she spoke only briefly, I hung on to every word.

"We're downgrading the rating of this threat to six-badge. Assuming that the spokespeople for the organization responsible for this mess are trustworthy, nobody within the school has been harmed. Our psychics and other surveillance corroborate this narrative. So far, the situation outside the school is under control. We hope to keep things that way."

The TV went back to a news studio at that point, so I lost interest. Six-badge threats, as far as I could remember, were kind of bad, but not really. From a trainer's perspective, all the designation meant was that all trainers who'd ever won six or more unique badges, who were currently in reach of the affected region, were legally obligated to help deal with the threat, whether it was to battle a bunch of bad guys or help with disaster relief. The League obviously kept track of what kind of pokémon you had access to, and where you were at the time, so you couldn't just not go if you were able to get there in time. Gym leaders had to have beaten all the gyms before they were allowed to register for the position, which meant that they were liable for all of the threats important enough to have ratings- six, seven and eight-badge.

There had been two gym leaders at the compound yesterday, though, and if I was getting this right the crisis in Allspice had started at some point yesterday too. I ruminated on the issue as I stepped through the Centre's automatic doors and headed down the road to Route 013. Whatever was going on, at least I wouldn't have to bother with it until I was a six-badger myself.

"Argh!" screamed a voice that was quickly becoming much too familiar for my tastes. I turned my head. Yeah, it was Fergus.

"What's up?" I said, not really wanting to know.  
"He's out! Again!" He stopped a few feet from me, in a stance that looked suspiciously like the lead-in to a fighting-type attack.

"Who's out?"

"The gym leader!" he half-snarled.

"Oh," I said. "That's-"

"I can't believe this," he went on, seeming to have forgotten about me completely. "I was in the top five at school, and here I am, I can't even get into a battle against the one leader I have a perfect type advantage against. That's so..."

I kept walking. There was nothing to be gained here. It was high time that I got out of this town, anyway.

* * *

"Nice! Now get back!" My lileep slid backwards a little, disentangling her vine-like petals from the buizel we were fighting, and I hurled my Pokéball at the buizel as it struggled to claw her Acid out of its eyes. The ball caught it right in the middle of its back. The impact triggered the ball's capture mechanism, and it snapped open for a second, converting the buizel into energy and drawing it inside.

I watched the ball intently as it dropped to the ground and began twitching. One... two... three... _click_. My Pokédex dinged, indicating a successful capture, and I pumped my fist in the air.

"Yes!" This was the first ever pokémon that I had properly _caught_ , instead of just having it given to me in a Pokéball. I'd made sure that it was a good one- buizel and their evolution, floatzel, were agile water pokémon with a strong offensive instinct and the ability to learn all kinds of good water-type attacks. It would be helpful for beating Cayenne's fire-type gym, and continue to be helpful for the rest of my career as a trainer.

I checked its details. Female, already knew a bunch of cool attacks, and pretty beat-up from the fight with Para. I put a potion to her Pokéball and fixed her up, then thought about a name for her.

"Undine," I said finally.

With that out of the way, I returned Para and continued on my way to get a look at Route 013's main attraction- the Zan Region's Safari Park. Built around a lake in the year 1952, it was a huge area of jungle and marshy terrain hemmed in by the famous Agamon Wall. Inside, there were colonies of species that were unavailable anywhere else in the region. Those pokémon could be dangerous, though, and so you had to have pokémon of your own- and three gym badges- before you were even allowed in.

I took a brief moment to reflect on how dumb it would be if you weren't allowed to bring your pokémon with you into a place full of nothing but unfamiliar pokémon.

Besides the Safari Park, Route 013 in general was kind of unimpressive. The lush greenery surrounding the path and the golden beaches that ran along the west of the route were pretty, but as I walked down the road, I began running into more and more cars sitting on the edges of the road. A gaggle of giggling children sprinted in front of me, followed by an arcanine dressed in a ridiculous frilly blue dress.

I scowled at the casual disrespect of such a rare and powerful pokémon- there were no growlithe native to this region- but kept going. I was about to have to walk past the infamous Safari Beach, tourist hotspot and den of everything I stood against. Littering. Loud people. Crowds. Wasting time.

A child ran up to me. Spiky-haired and bubbling with enthusiasm, he stared up guilessly at me and said, "Hi, trainer lady! Can I see your pokémon!"

I put one hand on Fang's ball. "Sure," I said.

Before I could scare the kid into manhood, I heard a girlish scream erupt from behind me. I whirled around to see a poliwhirl punching the living daylights out of the arcanine I'd seen earlier. A burly-looking guy in shades and torn sleeves stood with his arms crossed next to the spectacle, looking about as built as a poliwhirl himself. The arcanine's trainer- if it was even a trainer and not an owner- was nowhere in sight.

 _This_ was exactly why you had to train pokémon to fight.

"Thunder Fang that poliwhirl!" My arbok correctly followed the order, lunging forward faster than my I could follow and plunging his fangs into the side of the poliwhirl. The bite discharged a wave of electricity through the blue pokémon's body, and it reflexively thrashed backwards, incidentally hurling the limp arcanine to relative safety.

"What's the big idea, huh?" demanded the poliwhirl's trainer, who had probably noticed that I was the only one in the vicinity with a ball out. "I'm just fighting that arcanine, get it?"

We were surrounded by a crowd of horrified onlookers, most of which had pulled out cameras and phones and were snapping pictures of myself, the other guy, and our pokémon. Fang had pulled back after the attack, and was now flaring his hood as he stared down the poliwhirl we'd just attacked.

"You're not fighting shit," I snapped at him. "That arcanine's the weakest pokémon I've ever seen. You want a fight, you'll fight me, you cowardly _loser_."

A vein popped in his temple. "Arright that's IT! poliwhirl Bubble Beam GO!"

"Glare!" I shouted as the poliwhirl inhaled. Fang's eye glowed an intense red, and suddenly the poliwhirl stumbled and released a pathetic sliver of drool from its front.

Its trainer growled. "Bubble Beam!" he shouted again.

"Thunder Fang!" I spat.

Fang lashed out with his fangs again, catching the poliwhirl in the middle of its swirly stomach. It grunted in pain and fell to one knee.

The crowd surrounding us cheered, almost right into my ears, and I ground my teeth in frustration.

"Shut UP!" I shouted at them. With an air of shock and hurt, they did as I said. If they were going to watch this impromptu battle between the future Champion of the Zan League and some loser for free, the least they could do was let me concentrate.

Even with the poliwhirl paralysed and on the back foot, I knew that I couldn't let my guard down. This guy probably had lots more battle experience than I did right now, and his poliwhirl was probably no stranger to getting hit.

As expected, it managed to get to its feet and adopted a fighting stance.

"Earthquake!" shouted the trainer.

I barely had enough time to react. "Screech! Wrap! Get off the ground!" Fang let loose a hideous scream and lunged at the poliwhirl at the same time. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed people near me stumbling backwards, their hands over their ears, but that wasn't relevant. What was relevant was stopping that poliwhirl from knocking out my arbok in a single attack.

When at last the poliwhirl managed to stamp into the ground, sending out shockwaves that almost sent me sprawling, Fang was wrapped securely around its limbs and body, safe from the attack.

"Screech again," I called out. The other trainer hadn't been as on the ball as I had, even though _he_ was the one who should have been ready for his poliwhirl's attack- he was lying on the floor, groaning. Served him right for doing something as stupid as telling a pokémon right next to him to use Earthquake. The poliwhirl, without a trainer to guide it, stoically stood there as Fang screamed into its ears, over and over again. I grinned as its trainer, still lying in the centre of Fang's Screech range, slowly put his hands on his ears and gave up on trying to stand up.

"Now use Thunder Fang!" The electric-type attack finally finished off the poliwhirl in a shower of yellow sparks, and it collapsed, unconscious.

"Good job, Fang," I said as I returned my pokémon. I'd done that without making Fang take a single hit. The thought would've made me smile, but it was really down to that guy being an idiot. If he'd ordered his pokémon to use an attack that didn't incapacitate him more than it had incapacitated me, that battle could've ended very differently.

I looked around at the part of the route we'd been on. Almost everyone had been driven off by the combination of the poliwhirl's Earthquake and Fang's Screech, and the road looked like an excadrill had been taken to it- jagged lines emanated out from where the poliwhirl was lying, and the earth had been upturned completely in several places.

To my annoyance, the boy who had asked me to show him one of my pokémon was still standing nearby, staring at me in awe. He was open-mouthed and silent, which I supposed was an improvement.

"Was that enough for you?" I asked him.

"That... was... _so cool_ ," he breathed. "Omygosh what kind of pokémon was that? What type was it? Electric? I bet it was electric, it was so loud and-"

"Go away!" I snapped. "Don't you have parents? Friends?"

He shut up. I left him standing there, alone, amidst the wreckage left by the poliwhirl's Earthquake.

Seeing all these people around had killed my desire to see the Safari Park's walls. That was a trip that would have to wait for whenever I had my third badge and wanted to expand my team, which would be a while yet. Instead, I stuck to the main road, ignoring the curious stares of tourists who had heard (or felt) the commotion from my short battle earlier.

As I neared Cayenne itself, the bushes and trees of Route 013 gave way to more urban features- asphalt on the road, dinky concrete buildings, traffic cones, proper parking spaces. The sight of increasing numbers of cars and buses, and the thickening sounds of traffic, told me that I should get off the road, so I picked a side and started walking on the stunted grass that ran alongside it.

Cayenne was in clear view at this point; from here it was a spiny mass of vibrantly painted buildings, separated from the dense jungle around it by a narrow belt of roads. To its west lay the shimmering blue ocean- to its east, the towering peak of Mount Zan, and several shorter mountains that crowded in the distance behind it. I grinned. Cayenne was an even bigger city than Allspice, and it was way more accessible (despite the jungle ringing it). That meant one thing: tournaments. Even though I doubted that anybody worth impressing would be watching tournaments that I was currently eligible for, as a single-badge trainer, they were a great way to get a head-start on making real money.

* * *

According to the map function of my Pokédex, there was a relatively small stadium between the north entrance to Cayenne- where I was- and the Pokémon Centre inside. Since the walk from Fennel Town hadn't been taxing at all, I decided to give it a look, in the hopes that they were currently hosting an event. It was on the way, anyway.

When I got there, I was greeted by an unusual sight. From the outside, the stadium looked like it had been split in two; one half was a rundown, grey block interspersed with filthy windows, and the other was painted with alternating vertical bars of two bright shades of green. It was on the green half that I found the door, an imposing steel affair with visible bolts and a large crossbar, and a tacky neon sign.

"Ridin' Fighters Battle Stadium," I read aloud, slightly incredulous. I sighed and went in anyway.

Inside, I found the reception desk, a potted plant that was probably plastic, a few seats that were definitely plastic, and a boring-looking man who was probably meant to be behind the desk.

"Hi!" said the boring-looking man standing in front of the desk, looking and sounding inordinately cheerful for someone who was only working in the industry of pokémon battling in the broadest of senses.

"Why are you so happy?" I asked him.

He looked confused. "I... I don't know."

"Are there any matches on right now? For, like, watching?"

"Uh, yeah," he said. "A six on six between two five-badge trainers, I think."

That was pretty good. "And that's the door there, right?" I gestured to the door at the end of the reception room.

"Yeah," he said, sounding more sure of himself now.

"Cool." With that, I marched up to it and pulled the handle. It didn't budge.

"Whoah, whoah, stop!" The man clapped an arm on my shoulder.

I managed to restrain myself from decking him in the face. Instead, I calmly put his hand back where it belonged.

"Explain."

Confusion touched his face for a couple of seconds, but he recovered before I lost interest. "I need to scan your dex first."

"Why?"

"Because... you could be carrying illegal stuff? There's a detector in the doorway for anything on your person, but... technology and stuff?"

I almost hesitated when I thought of Para, but I managed to pass him my Pokédex without triggering any change in his stance. He had no idea. Hopefully, the computer he was scanning my dex with wouldn't either.

It didn't. He came back out from behind his desk and handed me my Pokédex, then took a small grey thing out of his pocket and pressed it. The door behind me swung open automatically in response. So it was a remote.

"Have fun," he said, waving me through the door. I thought he might've been a little half-hearted, but who could blame him?

"Hyper Beam!" shouted the girl closest to the entrance I'd come through. The ninetales in front of her opened its mouth and, in record time, unleashed a beam of searing hot energy on the mantine hovering across the field from it. Both pokémon looked pretty battered, but as the mantine was blasted back by the attack, I could see that the ninetales was the winner of this bout.

The trainer opposite her cursed and returned her mantine, then immediately sent out her next combatant- a burly vigoroth.

"Bulldoze!" commanded the vigoroth's trainer as soon as the vigoroth landed. It reacted instantaneously, pounding the floor with a vicious punch. A huge wave of dirt exploded out from underneath the vigoroth, slamming into the ninetales before it could recover from its own Hyper Beam.

The ninetales lady scowled, and at that point I realized that I was watching Daria- the older trainer who had made sure I was okay after my fight with Fang.

"Pain Split!" The ninetales screeched, pinkish energy flaring from its eyes, and suddenly it stood up straighter. Correspondingly, the vigoroth sagged a little, as if suddenly tired. "Heat Wave!"

The energy from the nintales' eyes turned blue momentarily, and then a wave of white-hot fire scoured the entire battlefield.

The vigoroth stood its ground, seemingly unruffled by the attack despite the fact that it had been hot enough to bend the air around the battlefield. "Rock Slide!"

A single huge boulder materialized above the vigoroth's head and flung itself at the ninetales. Mid-air, it fractured into a horde of smaller, jagged rocks.

"Protect! Hyper Beam!" The hail of stony shrapnel rained down harmlessly on the ninetales' translucent green barrier, which then evaporated to make way for the ninetale's second Hyper Beam attack. The wide beam struck the vigoroth hard, eliciting a grunt, but it managed to avoid being blown back like the mantine had been by digging its claws into the ground. Daria scowled again- she'd clearly been hoping that the attack would be enough to finish her foe off.

"Bulldoze again!"

"Protect!" The green barrier winked back into existence for a moment, but fizzled out as the Bulldoze reached the ninetales' position. The ninetales was flung upwards by the impact, but it managed to find its footing mid-air. As it landed- on all fours- the two trainers gave their next commands simultaneously.

"Quick Attack! Inferno!"

"Duckdoze!"

The ninetales shot forwards with blinding speed, intent on the vigoroth in front of it. Just as it seemed it would connect, the vigoroth slid out of the way and, in the same, fluid motion, slammed its fist into the ground.

But before the Bulldoze could hurl it into the air once more, the ninetales spat a blazing orb of fire into the vigoroth's face, at point blank range. The vigoroth gave an unearthly screech and fell backwards, continuing to scream at a volume that drowned out all other sound.

Abruptly, the screaming stopped. Red-faced, the vigoroth's trainer stowed a pokéball back into her belt, then marched forwards, her other hand awkwardly outstretched. Daria's ninetales bounded up to its own trainer and curled around her ankles, clearly pleased with its own performance. She gave it a scratch behind the ear and then returned it so that she could help close the distance between herself and the other trainer.

They met in the middle and shook hands. So the battle was over. Their mouths were moving, but I couldn't hear them from the stands when they weren't shouting commands at their pokémon. It wasn't like anything they were saying could be very important, anyway.

Remembering Daria's promise to me in Marma Forest, I strode up to them. This was my chance to battle a real pokémon expert. How had she even gotten five badges already? The season had only started five days ago, on the day that I'd gotten Caligula, and as far as I knew the gym leaders had mostly been tied up with whatever was going on in Allspice for the last two days.

The only explanation I could see was that she'd gone through the circuit before, maybe a couple of times, and had access to a really fast flying-type- or a pokémon that knew Teleport. If that was the case, she'd probably already participated in the Ruby Conference. I would have to look up videos tonight, although I'd never heard the name Daria in relation to high-level training before. Maybe she hadn't been able to get through the first round of battles for some reason.

"Um, hello?" said the female trainer who Daria had just beaten.

"It's me," I said, addressing Daria. "Janet Prosper."

Daria nodded slowly. "Oh, I... remember you. Marma Forest, right?"

"Yep. You caught my ekans! Except he's an arbok now."

For some reason that made her grimace. "Right."

"Can you battle right now?" I liked to cut to the chase.

"Um," Daria hesitated, "no. I used everyone I had on me in that battle. Don't like asking them to fight two different battles back to back."

"That's fine," I said. "How about tomorrow?"

Daria sighed. "Fine," she said. "I'll book it with the guys here, and message you the time with the Trainer Tracker app. Is that fine?"

"Absolutely," I said.

Tomorrow was going to be a great day.


	10. Force and Prowess

"Undine! Quick Attack!" My buizel shot forwards in the water and delivered a crushing blow on my opponent's clamperl, knocking it out for good. Shamefaced, the stranger battling me recalled his clamperl and stalked off without another word.

"Good job, Undine!" I declared, holding out a Finneon Stick. She snapped it up and swallowed it in a single, smooth motion, and I beckoned to the next trainer in the line. "Let's see what you've got!"

My team and I were currently standing in Cayenne's biggest Pokémon Park, getting in some last-minute training for our scheduled battle against Daria. I'd seen her and her ninetales working together back at school, so I had a pretty good idea for a strategy to use against it, but the rest of her team was a total mystery, and they were sure to be as tough as nails if they'd been through the gym circuit a couple of times already. If I was going to win, I would have to be smarter than her pokémon were strong.

"Go, Rillo!" shouted the next trainer, a short girl. Her sentret popped out of her ball and stiffened upon seeing my awesome buizel.

In the second Rillo and the girl took to weigh their options, I gave my own orders. " _Sonicboompursuit_!" Being able to say orders so rapidly like that was a massive advantage for any trainer, but it took practise to be fast _and_ precise. I'd been doing this all morning, though, so I had a good handle on at least a couple of good combinations for all four members of my current team.

Undine slapped the ground with her tail, unleashing a fast-moving burst of wind, and then barrelled into it, bolstering her own Sonic Boom with a dark aura.

"Defense Curl!" gabbled the girl opposite me.

The order, and the sentret, were too slow- Undine slammed into the ring on the sentret's stomach before it could get into a defensive stance. Before Undine could end the contact and pull back, I gave my second order.

" _QuickattackAquajet_!" This was the second combo I had for Undine. Theoretically, a Quick Attack on its own would probably have been enough to take out the lame rat we were fighting, but Undine and I needed to practise anyway.

Undine slugged the sentret in the stomach and then, wrapped in a blue aura, smashed into it headfirst again, hurling it across the park until it slammed into a tree and dropped to the floor, clearly unconscious.

The girl ran after her pokémon, her ball-hand outstretched. She missed the beam twice before she finally managed to return the sentret.

"Next!"

A boy swaggered up to the battler's diamond opposite me. "Go, Jaik!"

I knew what it would be before it had even finished materializing, and performed a perfect quick-execution switch-in in response. Goodbye Undine, hello Caligula.

"Caligula, use Bulldoze!"

A wave of dirt exploded out from beneath Caligula's front feet and hurtled towards the magnemite we were fighting.

Its trainer scoffed, clearly not expecting the attack to hit- magnemite hovered above the ground, and Caligula's Bulldozes didn't quite reach that height yet.

"Sonic Boom!" he ordered.

"Bulldoze," I said just after he finished.

The magnemite blasted Caligula with compressed air. She weathered the attack like a champ and stamped on the ground again, sending out another wave of dirt. The other trainer looked ready to order another attack, but then the first Bulldoze struck 'Jaik'.

Our opponent actually jumped when Jaik fell to the ground with a sonorous clang and began spitting out random sparks. The second Bulldoze, right on the tail of the first, hit the fallen magnemite 'normally', punting it a fair distance towards its trainer.

"What the-"

" _SandtombRockslide_!" I shouted triumphantly. Caligula generated a mass of loose dirt and flung it at the magnemite, then repeated the process with a bunch of rocks. Because the Rock Slide travelled more quickly through the air than the Sand Tomb, they reached the magnemite at the same time, bombarding it even further.

"Jaik! Get up!" pleaded the trainer.

" _SandtombRockslide_!" I said again. Magnemite were notoriously durable, so I would take the opportunity to get some more practise with my combination attacks.

"Sonic Boom!"

Caligula's second volley was blasted out of the air by the magnemite's attack. I blinked, then snapped out a retaliatory order.

"Dig!"

Looked like Jaik's trainer had worked out that being aloft was no special advantage against ground-type attacks without a Magnet Rise to support it, so he might as well attack from the ground level himself.

"Jaik, watch out for movement!" The magnemite began scanning the ground ahead of it with its single eye. I grimaced. No matter how strong Caligula was, I still hadn't worked out how to get her to follow orders that were as complex as that. Her Dig would take her directly beneath her opponent's current location, and make her attack it.

"Crunch!" I shouted when I figured enough time had passed. " _BullozeCrunch_ ,uh, _BulldozeCrunch_!"

"Jaik! Dodge!" It managed to rise up into the air and get out of the way several seconds before Caligula surfaced- I'd given my orders too early and tipped them off- but that didn't stop the Bulldoze from hitting it and allowing Caligula to close in to Crunch range.

Caligula sunk her teeth into Jaik's steel flesh with a horrible screeching sound, actually denting it between the strength of her jaws and the reinforcement provided by the Crunch attack itself.

"Mirror Shot!" said the other trainer. He had his ball out, ready to return his partner at the first sign of trouble.

The magnemite managed to successfully launch its attack, shoving Caligula a few feet back towards me, but it was dragged along with her.

" _BiteCrunch_!" I said. This was much easier than other combinations, being two syllables rather than four or five like some of the others were, but it was harder to use- Caligula usually wasn't in a situation where she was in range for both attacks.

" _Merrshot_!" screamed the other trainer, trying to be as fast as me. I grinned as his magnemite tanked Caligula's Bite without doing anything.

"Mirror Shot!" he shouted again, managing to calm himself down somewhat.

This time, the attack flew out just as Caligula was letting go of the magnemite. Both pokémon were propelled away from each other by the force of the attack.

"Dig!" Caligula vanished underground again. This time, I would get the timing right.

Jaik struggled back into the air. "Mirror Shot into the hole!" It floated over to the site of Caligula's second burrow and tossed a ball of bright light into it, but the attack did nothing- and then Caligula erupted from the ground beneath Jaik once again, disrupting its levitation.

"Crunch!" The moment Jaik landed in her open maw, she clamped her jaws together tight.

Defeated, the boy recalled his magnemite.

I shook my head in distaste. All those Alena Hale fanboys who didn't know the first thing about a magnemite were dragging the species down, just because she happened to be Zan's Champion and started her journey with one. And who even named their pokémon after the team members of a trainer that they might one day battle for themselves? Rank amateurs, that was who.

"Next!"

* * *

An hour of ridiculous stomps later, it was ten o'clock- time to make my way back to the (stupidly named) Ridin' Fighters Battle Stadium, in time for my battle. No-one on my team had evolved in all that training, but they'd all learned some pretty good moves, and I'd been able to practise my quick-draws and rapidfire calls. A lot of people didn't realize that trainers had to train _themselves_ , too, but I was ahead of the curve there with my commitment to learning from the real professionals in the field. Losers named their pokémon after their idols- winners _trained_ their pokémon like their idols.

I was about to cross the road in front of the Ridin' Fighters Battle Stadium and enter it when an unfamiliar voice caught my attention.

"Hey, is that Janet?" it said from some distance behind me.

"Oh my gosh... it is! What the heck?" said a _familiar_ voice.

They do say that familiarity breeds contempt.

"Nadia," I said, turning around. Sure enough, the other blonde was standing at the end of the street, next to some girl I didn't remember ever seeing in my life. She had a forgettable face- rounded, but not heavy, and rather unspectacular as far as colouration went. Nothing like my hair or the sparkling green eyes of Alena Hale. "Who's that?"

The forgettable girl gasped and put her hand to her mouth in mock horror. "She doesn't remember _me_?" she asked Nadia.

"She barely knew my name after I slept in the same room as her for a year," Nadia confided in a stage whisper. The two of them tittered like morons for a couple of seconds.

"Look," I said, "I have somewhere I need to be, so screw off."

"What a coincidence!" said the girl who was rapidly becoming 'the annoying girl' in my reckoning of things. "We're going somewhere too!"

"Great." I turned back to the road and groaned. The light had gone back to red.

It didn't look like there were any cars approaching, though, so I charged across the road in record time and barrelled through the stadium's front doors.

"Battle at ten thirty," I said to the receptionist.  
"Oh, hello again!"

I remembered that there had been a guy here yesterday, but not much about him. "Why are you still happy?"

"I... don't know." His face fell as the fundamental problem with his life appeared to him in full clarity. Good. He'd looked much too happy for someone who didn't even train pokémon for a living.

"Okay. Battle at ten thirty?" I repeated, this time inflecting a little to indicate that I needed a response that wasn't the inane blathering of an idiot with too much free time. I pulled out my Pokédex, remembering that it had been scanned last time, and handed it to him.

Suddenly listless, he accepted and scanned it wordlessly, then gave it back.

"Have fun," he said. He clicked his little remote and the metal door at the end of the room swung open again.

I swept through it, to find Daria already standing on the edge of the battlefield. I tensed in giddy anticipation.

She nodded at me in greeting. "Alright. Just a couple of things you ought to know: first, this is a public match, so anybody can come in to watch."

"I wouldn't have it any other way," I said, meaning it. I knew why she'd made it a public match, too- it meant we didn't have to pay to use the stadium.

"Second, I'm not accepting any Battle Points if I win this. It wouldn't be right, alright?"

"But-" She cut off my protest with a stern gesture.

"No buts," she said. "No Battle Points, or no battle. Okay?"

That sounded like she thought it would be too easy to beat me, but I grunted an agreement. I was just going to give this my all and see if I could _prove_ to her I could put up a fight.

"Now," she went on, "Three on three, no substitutions?"

"Sounds good to me," I said. I pulled out Caligula's ball.

She strolled sedately over to the other end of the pitch and, without any count-down or build-up, lobbed a plain red Pokéball at the centre of the pitch. "Go, Flare," she said.

Her ninetales exploded into existence in front of me, and I became aware of a sudden increase in temperature. That was weird.

"Caligula! Go!"

Ninetales versus trapinch. On paper the advantage was mine, but I knew that it wasn't going to be an easy advantage to make use of.

"Bulldoze, Dig!" I rattled off, my standard defensive opening.

"Dig, Safeguard, Extrasensory," Daria said, like she was checking items off a list. "Short orange-E ten, hold blue-K four."

That last thing was not an attack. I stared as the ninetales ducked under ground as naturally as Caligula had done, neatly avoiding her Bulldoze in the process, and then hurled Caligula out from where _it_ had entered the ground with a burst of blue energy. Caligula landed on her back some distance ahead of me with a muffled _thump._

"Dig!" I said. She managed to right herself without too much difficulty and dove right back into the ground, only to be hurled back out a moment later, Daria's ninetales hot on her heels. " _Rockslide_!"

Boulders formed around Caligula in mid-air, even as she tumbled back to the earth. If I could land a close-range super-effective hit, I might-

"Protect!" Daria said. " _Solar_ _b_ _eam_ _R-A_ _four_!"

"Dig!"

The boulders collided harmlessly with the ninetales' green barrier as it twisted around in mid-air. Caligula landed nimbly on the floor beneath the ninetales. Solar Beam took a while to charge, so I figured the Dig would get Caligula out of the way until the threat-

A horrifyingly quick Solar Beam struck her in the face, proving me wrong.

She fell over, and didn't get up again.

I recalled her and took a moment to pick out my next battler. If her Solar Beam was going to charge up that quickly, I needed something that resisted grass... and something that would be fast enough to actually score a hit on that ninetales.

"Fang!"

Besides the Solar Beam thing, Fang didn't have any special advantage over the ninetales, but I didn't think I would need it.

"Protect!"

"Glare! _CrunchThunnerfang_!" After a moment's pause, I reiterated. "Thunder Fang!"

The Glare broke through the ninetales' hastily erected barrier- Protect did less if it was used repeatedly over a short period of time- and Fang was finally able to connect with a Crunch and a Thunder Fang in quick succession.

"Extrasensory!"

I responded with another " _CrunchThun_ der _fang_!" Then it occurred to me what she'd just said, and the oversight I'd just made.

"Cancel!" I snapped, and Fang dropped to the floor, aimless for a moment. The dangerous blue energy passed harmlessly over his head. " _Acid_! _Stockpile_!"

I'd completely forgotten about Extrasensory, I thought as I breathed a mental sigh of relief. The ninetales ducked out of the way of Fang's acidic projectile and Daria ordered it to use Flamethrower, which Fang was able to avoid without any prompting.

" _GlareAcid_!"

Fang's eye glowed red and he spat out another wave of brown sludge, but Daria said, "Red-E six dodge Solar Beam." Seemingly unaffected by the Glare, it avoided the Acid by a comfortable margin and blasted Fang with a rapidly charged beam of solar energy. Fang hissed, in annoyance more than pain. It occurred to me that Daria had set up a Safeguard almost as soon as the battle had begun, which was probably why Glare wasn't doing anything.

"Crunch!"

"Extrasensory," Daria said.

I groaned, suddenly reminded that the psychic-type attack was why I'd wanted to take her from a distance to begin with. " _CancelStockpile_!" I hadn't practised saying that one at all, but it was easier to say fast than most other combinations of words.

" _QuickattackInferno_!" As Fang flattened himself on the ground, narrowly avoiding his second Extrasensory of the day, the ninetales pounced on him with blinding speed, muzzle already brimming with fire- the same combo that had taken out the vigoroth yesterday.

"CRUNCH!" I half-screamed. Fang thrust upwards with his sinuous body, dislodging the ninetales briefly and giving himself an opening to fix his jaws around its neck. The Inferno attack exploded out of the ninetales' mouth but went wide, careening into the bleachers and exploding harmlessly in the distance.

" _ThunderfangBite_!" Fang withdrew for a nanosecond and then struck again, catching the ninetales at the same spot- this time with a bite that crackled with electricity- and then repeated the manoeuvre once more, this time with a simple Bite attack.

"Disable, _Extrasensorylong_ ," Daria said, looking more animated now that her ninetales had actually taken a big hit. The ninetales' eyes flashed blue and Fang's body locked up, keeping even his eye from moving in its socket for a couple of seconds. Then the ninetales' third shot at an Extrasensory flew from its eyes and struck true. My jaw dropped as Fang was launched into the ceiling by the force of the attack.

Luckily, I had enough presence of mind to recall him as he fell back to earth.

"What's next," asked Daria, a little bit of a smile playing about the corners of her lips now that the battle had gotten more interesting. For a moment there, I'd actually drawn blood, so to speak.

"Just watch," I said. I had two left. Undine was going to fare about as well as Fang had, between her reliance on close combat and vulnerability to Solar Beam, which left just _one_ option. "Go, Para!"

She raised an eyebrow as the light of my third and final Pokéball for this battle faded, revealing my third and final pick.

"A lileep, huh? How'd you even get one of those?"

" _Ancientpower_!" I said in reply. "Ingrain, _Confuseray_!"

"Protect," said Daria softly.

Several rocks appeared in the air around Para and hurled themselves at the ninetales with telekinetic force, but they dissipated harmlessly on contact with the ninetales' Protect attack. The Confuse Ray missed completely.

One out of three wasn't _terrible_.

"Heat Wave." The ninetales' eyes went an electric blue colour and it _breathed_ out a current of heat and flame that coated the battlefield in the blink of an eye. Para whined, clearly uncomfortable, but held her ground regardless.

"Dig!" said Daria as I was just making my own next move.

" _AncientpowerAcid_!" Para sent both attacks hurtling at the ninetales, but it had plenty of time to duck underground, safely out of the way. "Para, hold! When it comes out to hit you, hit it with an Acid!"

Para trilled her agreement and seemed to hunch over, as if bracing herself for the ninetales' incoming attack.

"Long-Red-C-ten surfacing! Extrasensory!"

To my horror, the ninetales emerged several feet to Para's left, instead of directly underneath her like a Dig attack was supposed to do. Then, _also_ to my horror, the ninetales then executed another Extrasensory. Though Para's Ingrain spared it from being thrown into the air like Caligula and Fang had been, the attack had to have hit her hard, especially on top of the Heat Wave earlier.

"Heat Wave!" Think of the devil.  
"Ancient Power!" As the ninetales readied its finishing move, Para produced more boulders and flung them haphazardly in the ninetales' direction. A few hit home, but they barely fazed the ninetales.

The ninetales exhaled another wave of flame over the battlefield, bathing Para in searing heat once more.

When the harsh glare of the attack cleared, I was surprised to see Para still standing. That Ingrain was keeping her in the fight, I guessed.

"Ancient Power!"

" _Quickattack_ _Protect_!" Though she started saying it after I started my command, she finished it before I finished saying my piece. The ninetales lunged forwards and connected almost instantly, then ensconced itself in another protective shell without missing a beat or moving back from Para at all. Para's attack once again clattered harmlessly against the Protect.

I ground my teeth together. Protect was becoming a real pain in the neck.

" _Acid_!"

"Hyper Beam!"

Para managed to land her Acid attack on the ninetales, being in point blank range and all, but it did nothing to dissuade the ninetales from launching its own point blank attack at her. The Hyper Beam was bright enough that I had to shield my eyes with my arm. When at last I saw that the light had died off, I looked back at the battlefield to see that Para lying flat on the floor, her base still rooted to the pitch but clearly unable to battle any longer. I returned her without another word. Zero to three, I thought bitterly. Daria was stronger _and_ smarter than I was right now.

"Good battle," Daria said, strolling over to me with her ninetales by her side. She seemed more at ease now, for some reason. "You and your arbok managed to get us pretty good with those cancels." She extended her hand.

I took it, shook it, and nodded stiffly. "Thanks. Good battle."

"I'm gonna... go, now. Maybe we'll meet again?" She walked off, her ninetales trailing after her. That suited me. Now that the battle was over, ideas for ways to train up my team were beginning to bubble up inside my head. Those random colours, letters and numbers she were saying must have been something to do with aiming attacks. If I could work out a code like that, then attacks like Dig and Quick Attack would become much more flexible for me.

Unfortunately, there was another obstacle for me there. As of now, Para was the only pokémon I had who seemed to be able to reliably understand anything that wasn't a direct order to attack. Fang was almost good at it as she was, but Caligula and Undine were both completely unresponsive.

I sighed and made for the door, only to find my way barred by Nadia and the annoying girl.

I pulled out and expanded Undine's Pokéball. "Get lost," I said.

"Hey, hey, we were just going to invite you to lunch later!" said the annoying girl. I squinted suspiciously at her, then at Nadia, who shrugged.

"This wasn't _my_ idea," she grouched.

Her friend elbowed her in the side.

"I mean, uh, friendship," she said weakly.

"I have a holiday house up in the north side of the city," her friend told me. "I'll send you the address through the fanmail system if you promise to be there by one?"

Holiday house? And... "Fanmail system?"

"On the Trainer Tracker!" said the girl. "You have that app, right?"

"Yeah, on my Pokédex. You can send fanmail with that?" I had obviously looked up the profiles of every single famous trainer I knew as soon as I discovered the Trainer Tracker app, but I hadn't noticed a _fanmail_ option.

Not that I was ever going to use it. Even if it had an anonymous option.

"Yeah, duh," she said.

It sounded like she was rich. Did I want to get involved in rich people things? This had to be a rich person thing. But why was _I_ getting invited to it? I had to know. "Fine," I said. "I'll be there."

"Fantastic!" said the girl. "See you at one! Don't forget! Come on, Nads."

I snorted. _Nads_.

Nadia gave me the evil eye, but didn't say a word as she flounced after her buddy.

With that, it was time for me to get my team healed up and plan my next move.

* * *

I needed TMs, I decided as I stood in front of the main desk in the Pokémon Centre, waiting for the nurse to return with my four pokémon. Most pokémon couldn't learn Protect naturally, but it was supposed to be compatible with almost every species of pokémon known to humankind in spite of that, including (I hoped) all four members of my team. Having a TM for Protect at my disposal would be an excellent way to immediately bolster my team's strength, not to mention all the other powerful attacks that could be loaded onto a TM. (Like Hyper Beam.)

That said, getting my hands on a TM was a matter of money, not Battle Points. From where I was standing, in the middle of the Centre's main lobby, I could see a couple of posters on the walls that advertised rookie battle tournaments (and boasted pretty substantial cash prizes), but so far the only ones I could see were limited to two and three badges. That meant I would have to beat Fyron sooner rather than later, which wasn't exactly a bad thing.

In fact, I thought with a kick in my heart, I could check on the gym as soon as I got my pokémon back, and see if he was available for a challenge. If he was, I could fight him then and there, and make it to Nadia's friend's place in time for lunch there.

The nurse returned, and I thanked her warmly in the excitement of my epiphany. She looked mildly surprised.

"You're welcome," she called after me as I strode purposefully out of the Pokémon Centre, already bringing up directions to Cayenne Gym on my Pokédex.

Only a couple of blocks away, I thought with no small amount of gratification. I made my way through the two busy streets that stood between the Centre and the most important building in this entire city, already feverishly going over my strategy in my head. The main fire-types in this region were magby, larvesta, and vulpix, so he'd probably use at least one of those. Archer _had_ gotten his hands on a zubat, so I couldn't rule out foreign species entirely, but that didn't matter.

I couldn't use Daria's code yet at all, without any time to practice with my team, but she'd used a couple of strategies that I was willing to try for myself. Top one was scouting with Protect- even if I didn't have Protect myself, Caligula's Dig served a similar purpose, and even worked as a good weapon against the fire-types that Cayenne's gym leader favoured. The Quick Attack/Inferno trick was another trick that I could use to great effect; it could help Undine land a Water Gun if she was up against something fast, and I could see Fang using Crunch in conjunction with Poison Sting or Acid for a similar effect.

In no time at all, Cayenne Gym loomed up ahead of me, red-roofed and walled with sleek, silver windows that gave it a modern feel. It was easily five times taller _and_ wider than the gym in Fennel Town, looking almost like a miniature skyscraper. The classic Pokéball-and-lightning-bolt symbol, emblazoned in white on a red panel some distance above the door of the building, was the only indication that the two gyms were even related.

The gym's automatic doors swung open, revealing a glorious paradise. Leafy plants poured from all four walls, spilling freely out of baskets and pots. Between them, in little islands of space between clusters of vegetation, stood simple white braziers that blazed with orange fire. The floor was covered with white tiles that almost seemed to sparkle in the vibrant light of the room.

The biggest and most impressive feature of the room, though, lay right ahead of me. Behind a desk built out of expensive-looking wood and an equally expensive-looking male receptionist, there was an indoor _lake_ , complete with an overgrown wall of rugged rock and a wide waterfall that serenely tumbled from somewhere beyond the back wall of the room. A pair of eevee and a solitary vulpix were splashing around on the far shore of the lake, enjoying themselves as much as I was enjoying the aesthetic of the room.

"Are you here to make an appointment?" asked the receptionist, smoother than a persian coat.

"Y-yes," I said. I'd almost forgotten what I'd come here for. "Janet Prosper." I walked up to his desk and passed him my Pokédex for his inspection, still drinking in the details of this place. "Why's this gym so..."

"Natural?" prompted the receptionist. He handed me my dex.

"Yeah."

The receptionist pressed a button on his desk, reminding me a little of the guy at the Ridin' Fighters Battle Stadium. That thought evaporated when an obsidian bridge rose up out of the lake behind him, sloughing off water as it joined the floor and the rocky wall at the back of the gym together. Then the waterfall split itself in half, parting like a curtain to reveal a corridor lined with the same white braziers that were in this room.

"'Natural' always been Fyron's way of doing things," he said, gesturing to the bridge. I took a tentative step onto it. Somehow, it was bone dry.

"Oh."

"You're lucky," he went on. "Most trainers come here after lunch."

Well, I had some place to go for lunch. Not that he needed to know.

"Just go straight down that corridor. He'll be in the main arena."

I nodded and waved him goodbye. It was time for my second gym battle.


	11. Forging Progress

Fyron was _big_. Tall and broad-shouldered. It almost seemed like an errant twitch would see him sending a lesser man flying, completely by accident.

Unlike his suited man out in the lobby, Fyron's outfit was much more relaxed. He wore a loose floral print shirt, almost like something out of an Alolan vacation, and tan breeches. The ensemble clashed horribly with his hair- electric blue, like Allspice's gym leader Mila.

Diplomatically, I elected not to say anything.

"Hey!" boomed Fyron as I walked in. "Is this another challenger?"

"Yes," I said, confidently taking my place opposite him. He was already in position to battle. I supposed that during peak work hours, he just stood there between challenges.

"What's _your_ name?"

I grinned. Finally, someone who knew how it was done. "I'm Janet Prosper, from Allspice City. And I'm gonna kick your ass!"

"Bahaha!" laughed Fyron. "You've got fire!"

The pun would've been weak from anyone else, but Fyron was tough. I could respect him, and any puns that he might make. Gym leaders had to stick to their theme, after all.

"Well," he continued, "I'm Fyron! Just that, and nothing else! So..." He pulled out a Pokéball. "Let's go! Three on three, no time limit, no boundaries! Go, Hana!"

Out came a flareon. I should've expected it after the two eevees frolicking in the lake in the lobby, but I hadn't really been thinking about battling back then.

"Go, Caligula! _BulldozeDig_!"

Fyron grinned. "Follow it! Quick Attack up!"

Caligula responded to my order as soon as she appeared, sending out a pulsing wave of upturned dirt and then vanishing underground in quick succession. Hana the flareon shot into the air, avoiding the Bulldoze, and then followed Caligula down her burrow.

"Bulldoze!"

The flareon was hurled back to the surface, followed by a spray of dark dirt. It cried out, but seemed relatively unhurt when it landed. Fyron blinked, evidently not expecting that particular move. I mentally breathed a sigh of relief- I wasn't sure how Dig and Bulldoze interacted, but I was glad that this was what it had done.

"Dig!" Fyron shouted after a moment, but he was too late- Caligula burst out of the ground beneath the flareon and smacked it aside with her head.

"Crunch!" The flareon squealed as it was trapped in Caligula's powerful jaws.

"Fire Spin!" Fire sprung up around the flareon's body. Suddenly Caligula was swung around the flareon in her mouth and slammed into the ground headfirst. "Sunny Day!"

Using Sunny Day meant it would be standing still for a couple of seconds. "Bulldoze!" Caligula rolled over and executed the move simultaneously, sending out another Bulldoze. This one punched the flareon from up close, making its legs buckle and sweeping it backwards.

It was prone on the ground- easy pickings for a Rock Slide.

"Rock Slide!"

"Dig!" shouted Fyron. Recovering with startling speed, the flareon managed to get itself underground. The tip of its bushy tail was just vanishing into its burrow as Caligula finally launched her attack.

"Crunch!" Caligula opened her mouth and awaited the flareon's arrival.

" _ShadowBall,_ " said Fyron. I blinked as an orb of spectral energy exploded beneath Caligula's feet. She cried out, but didn't budge from her spot.

"Dig!" I said as Fyron inhaled again.

" _ShadowBall_!"

Caligula punched into the ground. The 'splash' of another exploding Shadow Ball flew out of the new pit, but I figured that it wouldn't hurt as much now that Caligula's big head was in the way. "Crunch! Bulldoze!" This time, the Bulldoze pushed them both out from underground, but without hurling the flareon into the air like last time- probably because Caligula was weighing them down. " _Rock_ _s_ _lide_!" This time, I would do it with the flareon securely in Caligula's mouth.

" _Fire_ _sp_ _in_!" said Fyron quickly.

The move flipped Caligula upside down and broke her grip again, but it didn't matter- her rocks appeared almost on top of the flareon and slammed into it with tremendous force, launching it clean across the room.

Fyron recalled it before it actually hit one of the walls, and nodded at me. "That was pretty hot battling, but let's see how well you handle it when _I_ turn up the _heat._ "

Okay, the puns were starting to get on my nerves now.

"Go, Kieran," he said. Out came a pokémon that I vaguely recognised... a fletchinder, probably, since this was the fire gym and that thing could definitely fly.

" _RockslideRockslide_ ," I said immediately. Against a flying-type, I just had to use supereffective ranged attacks and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, the fletchinder easily avoided both volleys of rocks. "Flamethrower!"

"Dig!"

It took a lot less time to say Dig than Flamethrower, so Caligula was able to avoid the return attack without taking even a bit of the gout of fire that the fletchinder spat at her.

The fletchinder spent a couple of minutes darting randomly through the air above the battlefield as we waited for Caligula to resurface.

"Rock Slide!" I said.

Caligula, and a collection of floating rocks, burst out of the ground almost right in front of Fyron. He stumbled backwards and shouted, "Protect! Fly!"

The fletchinder didn't use Protect at all (Fyron must have panicked and said the first thing that came to mind), but it did shoot up until it was almost touching the ceiling of the gym. Caligula's Rock Slide fell abysmally short of its new height, and the boulders smashed back into the earth around her.

"Flame Charge," said Fyron. He'd gotten a lot quieter. Suspicious. His fletchinder erupted with flames and dove from the sky, heading straight for Caligula.

"Crunch!" Caligula opened her mouth, ready to catch the flaming bird in its tracks.

" _FlyFlamecharge_."

The bird abruptly climbed back out of its descent, narrowly avoiding Caligula's jaws as they swung shut like a stantler trap, then immediately returned to its attack, this time much faster. It struck Caligula in the middle of her shell-like back, knocking her off her stumpy legs and making her cry out.

Good move, Fyron, I thought to myself. "Dig!"

Recovering somewhat, my trapinch dove back to the safety of the underground.

Fyron countered with an escape move of his own. "Fly!"

"Rock Slide!" I said, hoping that Caligula would be fast enough to hit it before it could get out of range.

She burst out from the ground and, after a moment's concentration, hurled another volley of rocks up at her opponent. It easily flitted out of the way, sped up by its successive Flame Charges, and glanced at its trainer for further orders.

"Flame Charge!"

"Dig," I said, hoping that Caligula would be fast enough to get underground before the fletchinder got to her.

She wasn't.

The attack threw her onto her back, and this time, she didn't roll back onto her feet and keep going. With a sigh, I returned her. She hadn't landed a single hit against that fletchinder, but she had managed to take out that flareon for me. It would have to be enough.

"Go, Para!"

My lileep trilled and flexed her tendrils as she sized up our opponents.

" _AncientpowerBrine_! Ingrain!"

I would have picked Undine, but that fletchinder had powered up with a couple of Flame Charges, and I didn't want to risk my main up-close threat for this gym on something that would be almost impossible to catch. Para had the supereffective attacks I needed for this battle, and the power to stall against anything that was in Fyron's arsenal.

On top of that, I had a little surprise for the fletchinder if it went on the offensive.

"Flame Charge!" The fletchinder shot forwards, curving around the boulders of Para's Ancient Power and the salty droplets of her Brine, clearly intent on the lileep in front of it.

I waited a couple of seconds, then- " _Constrict_!"

Fyron looked up at me, clearly surprised, then back at his pokémon. Its cloak of fire had dissipated, and now it struggled in Para's embrace.

" _AcidBrine_!" Para spat out a mixture of seawater and acidic juices all over the fletchinder in her grasp, making it squawk in pain.

" _Steelwing_!" Fyron shouted. He finally sounded like he was treating this seriously. "Get out of there!"

I responded in kind. " _Constrict_!" If he wanted to get his fletchinder out, I was going to make it harder. " _AcidBrine_!"

" _Flamecharge_!" The fletchinder's body began steaming, but under the deluge of water and acid that Para was vomiting over it, the attack wasn't starting up properly. I filed away that useful interaction for later use.

"Constrict! _AcidBrine_!"

The fletchinder's feathers flared into life, but they died back down with a fizzling noise before anything could happen. Steam rose up from the pokémon's body- Para's watery onslaught was just too much for the fletchinder to handle. It fell limp in Para's tendrils, drenched and defeated. The beam from its Pokéball struck it shortly afterwards, restoring it to its energy form. Fyron tilted his head- a sign of respect.

I felt like I could punch a stormcloud out of the sky. _This_ was how battles were meant to go.

"Go, Growly!" said Fyron, after a brief moment.

His third and final combatant for the battle- growlithe, the unevolved form of arcanine. I knew from second-hand experience that arcanine were fast and tough, but not particularly strong in any one respect. Hopefully, that was true of their unevolved form as well, especially now that Fyron knew the broad strokes of what Para could do.

"Fire Blast!" Fyron called.

I was taken aback by the high power opening, but that didn't hamper me in the least. " _AncientpowerAcidBrine_!"

Both pokémon took a moment to summon up the requisite materials for their respective attacks, and launched them simultaneously- Growly's fireball and Para's staggered and mixed offensive. The attacks collided in the centre of the field.

Just as I'd hoped, the mass of water and rock trumped the Fire Blast. As the fire-type attack detonated in mid-air with a brilliant shower of light and smoke, I squinted and half-heartedly moved to shield my eyes, still focused on the battle.

" _Irontail_!"

Unexpectedly, the growlithe came charging in from the left side of the field, not from behind the impromptu smokescreen thrown up by its attack. I almost winced alongside Para as its tail, shining with white light, collided with Para's stalk, but I had to stay focused.

" _Constrict_!"

" _Fireblast_!"

With speed that surprised even me, Para lashed out at the growlithe with all of her tendrils and caught it. Before she could reel in her catch, though, it spat another ball of fire at her. Squealing, she recoiled. The growlithe was flung aside, but it managed to twist in the air and land on its feet.

" _Brine_!"

" _Irontail_!"

No holds were barred now- both of us were spitting out commands as quickly as humanly possible. Para looked pretty beat up, after the super-effective Iron Tail and the neutral Fire Blast. If I was going to end this with her, I needed to do it quickly.

" _Ancientpower_!"

Fortunately, as the growlithe charged down the pitch towards her, angling its path so that it avoided the hail of water that Para had launched at it, I could see that it wasn't moving as fast before. The glow of its tail looked a little dimmer, too.

The Ancient Power I'd called for just now finally flew into action.

"Home Run!"

I frowned. Was that a real attack? It sounded kind of like it would be one of those boring, gimmicky normal-type moves. Whatever it was, I didn't much care- all it presented me with was an opportunity for a counterattack.

"Br-"

A tremendous _clang_ drowned out the rest of my order. Aghast, I could only watch as Para was flattened by one of the boulders from her own Ancient Power.

I blinked and looked at the growlithe. Although it was breathing heavily now, its tail was glowing again and it had its chest puffed out, like it had something to be proud of. It barked back at Fyron. The gym leader gave it a thumbs up, then pointed back at me and Para. House Run... that was a _sport_ thing, wasn't it? Had he just used a sport move against me?

Cursing internally, I recalled Para and pulled out Undine's Pokéball. Using my newly caught buizel had been part of the plan all along, of course, but for a second there I'd honestly thought that Para could do it on her own.

" _AquajetQuickattack_ ," I said almost absentmindedly. Undine shot out from her ball and slugged the growlithe upside the head before it could do anything, then slammed it in the face with her tail, knocking it flat.

Fyron shrugged and returned his pokémon.

"Wait, what?" It had barely taken any hits from Para, as far as I could see, but just two from Undine was enough to knock it out?

"She's a little young," said Fyron. He strode over the field, carefully picking his way around the mounds that marked Caligula's burrows, and offered me his empty palm.

I'd expected a badge to be there, so I stared at it for a few seconds before it occurred to me that he wanted to shake my hand. I seized it quickly, pumped it up and down a little, then allowed it to drop to his side.

"Good work," he told me. "I can already tell that you're a real go-getter."

"Uh, thanks," I said. That was flattering, I guessed.

"Here's your prize- the Spice badge!" he declared, pulling it out of his pocket and handing it to me. I held it up to the air to inspect it- looked like a tamato berry in the middle of a roaring fire.

"Thanks!" I repeated, more enthusiastically this time. Five days into my journey, and I _already_ had two badges to my name.

"That battle really got me fired up," he added, his grin broadening. "I hope we meet again!" His puns had not gotten better with time, so I couldn't truthfully return his sentiment. _  
_

That didn't matter, though. What _did_ matter was that I could finally sign up for a bona fide pokémon tournament.


	12. Blacklight Pt 1

The Pokémon Centre was buzzing with activity when I returned. Grumbling slightly to myself, I squeezed into the crowd of trainers and conversation. Nobody paid me any mind, which suited me just fine.

When I finally managed to get to the front desk, I dropped off my team with the nurse there and inched my way to the bulletin board with all the tournament posters on it that I'd seen last time. When I got _there_ , it only took me a second to find the biggest and most vibrant poster- a huge black one with a light-strewn stadium dominating the background. Another sweep to make sure I hadn't missed anything, and then I committed to the cool one.

* * *

 **ROOKIE RUMBLE – WEEK ONE**

Rookie trainers! Do you think you have what it takes to be the best?

Prove it this week in front of a live audience!

Fight the best new trainers in the Northern Area! Win up to 4000P in prizes!

* * *

Underneath that there was an address, a phone number, some details about entering the tournament (two badges, no entry fee), and the date of the tournament- today, at 6:30 pm. That was convenient.

The tournament's name gave me pause, but I had to brush it off. It wasn't like anything else on this bulletin board was any better. Everybody started out as a beginner. I couldn't go around turning my nose up at everything that had the word 'rookie' in its title, not while I _was_ a rookie.

I checked the time idly. It was barely noon, which left me a lot of time to train even more with my team. All I had to do was grab lunch.

At that thought, Nadia's punchable face loomed up in my mind. I groaned audibly. Right, she and her lame friend wanted me for something, at one o'clock. I looked back at the tournament poster. Should I talk to two people I didn't like about something that was bound to be a useless waste of time... or have fun doing my favourite thing in the whole world?

Well, when I put it that way, it was obvious what the right answer was.

* * *

Six hours later, I was standing in the stadium itself, as per the request of the stern old lady that had accepted my application at noon. Said old lady was here in the stadium now, pacing menacingly up and down in front of me and the other fifteen entrants to this tournament. As you might expect, there weren't a lot of trainers in Zan's Northern Area who already had two badges- between the distance between Cayenne and any noteworthy cities, and whatever the crisis in Allspice had been, it was frankly impressive that there were even sixteen of us.

A giant spotlight swivelled towards us, throwing blinding light into my eyes, and I stepped back reflexively. I trod on something that felt like a foot.

"Ouch," grumbled someone from behind me.

I turned and hissed an apology. He grunted and went back to looking surly, or whatever it was that dudes did while they weren't busy being crushed under my heel. For some reason, everybody else seemed to decide that this was an ideal cue to begin exchanging names and life stories. The old lady running this joint curled her lip but didn't move to stop them.

"Hi," said the girl next to me. The glare of the spotlight trained on us had her squinting. "My name's Damia."

I looked her up and down. Brown hair, short, dark-skinned. Looked like she was ten rather than fifteen.

"So, um, where are you from?" she asked.

"Allspice," I said.

Her eyes widened. "Whoah," she said. "That's far away, isn't it?"

I shrugged. "Not really."

"I'm from nearby," she said, sounding almost wistful. "You probably haven't heard of it, but it's called Sorrel."

Oddly enough, the name rang a bell. "Oh," I said, idly flipping through my mental catalogue of notable trainers in the last fifteen years. "That's... Ender Cessar's hometown, right?"

Damia bobbed her head excitedly. "Yeah! You've heard of us?"

"Well, I've heard of Cessar," I said with a shrug. "He nearly beat Alena Hale last year."

She deflated slightly, but nodded again. "Yeah, it was all that my dad could talk about for weeks."

She fell silent. For a minute, the vague conversations carrying on around us were the only sound in the world. "Is he any good?" I asked her.

"What?"

"Your dad. Is... he a trainer?"

"Oh! Um, no," said Damia. "Is yours?"

I grimaced. "No," I said. Finality laced that single word.

"Oh," said Damia. Thankfully, she picked up the hint and turned away, probably to join in on the animated conversation taking place on her right.

It wasn't that I felt bad about not having a family, or about being a ward of the government. That wasn't why I'd evaded her question about my dad without letting on that I didn't even have one. I just hated seeing how people changed when they found out. They went from normal to _pitying_ , like discovering that I was an orphan had somehow turned me into glass while I wasn't looking. It was just another thing that I didn't have the time or patience to deal with.

I dug out my Pokédex and checked the time. Ugh. Still twenty-five minutes to go.

With nothing else to do, I whiled away the minutes by scrolling through the health statistics and movesets of all four of my team members. The first few rounds of this tournament were probably going to be blind one-on-ones, which called for my arbok, Fang- easily my strongest battler in a fair fight. Without foreknowledge of my opposition, he was the safe bet; after all our training, he even had a couple of tricks to use against steel- and ground-types, should we encounter them.

For the same reason, I was going to field Fang as my opening pick in the bigger matches; the semifinals and the finals. There was no doubt in my mind that I would reach them, but even if there had been... it was just common sense to have a strategy ready.

* * *

"Lay-dies an' gennlemen, tonight is de night you've allll been waitin' for! De night of dis season's first Rookie Rumble!" announced the in-house commentator, his voice projected by an exploud wearing headphones and a baggy T-shirt emblazoned with the Rookie Rumble logo. He was met with uproarious applause. The stands were packed; a rainbow of faces and colours were looking down at us, the trainers.

The shoutcaster adjusted his shades. "Tonight, _sixteen_ young trainuhs are gonna battle! Only _one_ will emerge victorious!" He snapped his head imperiously towards the eight of us. We were standing awkwardly in the marshalling area. It had been thirty minutes already. "Get me Amanda Black! Get me Janet Prosper!"

If I'd been drinking something, I would have spat it back out. I scanned the line of trainers on my right- sure enough, Amanda Black, the _Allspice_ Amanda Black, stepped out from the mass of unimportant faces. If she was as surprised as I was, she didn't show it. In fact, her face betrayed no sign of recognition at all. She wore the perfect poker face as she made her way to the closest end of the pitch, ignoring even the cheers and shouts from the crowd.

How had she even qualified for this tournament? She must have beaten Fennel and Cayenne too, just like me. Well- that didn't matter. She was a whiny loser, I reminded myself firmly. Couldn't even face a one-eyed arbok without crying and giving up.

"Hurry up," hissed the old lady, who I guessed was our minder for this event.

"Right," I mumbled. I charged out after Amanda, making a beeline for the opposite side of the pitch. When I finally got there- after what felt like hours- I made a motion for Fang's Pokéball. It occurred to me that the only pokémon that I knew Amanda had on her was her larvitar. A pokémon that had a titanic type advantage against both the Fennel and Cayenne gyms, given their particular specialities. A pokémon that countered Fang almost without even trying. He did have his ace against ground-types, but why should I risk it? Almost without having to think about it, my hand drifted to rest on Undine's pokéball.

"Ready!" Almost in synchronisation, we picked up our respective pokéballs.

"Set!" With a _shoop_ , the ball in my hand expanded. The metal was refreshingly cool against my palm.

"GO!"

"Undine!" I hurled the ball as hard as I could, intending to get Undine as close to the larvitar as possible. As soon as the ball hit the ground- a solid three-quarters of the pitch away from me- I began my first order. " _AquajetQuickattack_!"

She launched herself at the first thing she saw- orange paw met green skin.

That was when I realised that we weren't fighting a larvitar at all.

"Hegel," started Amanda. I might have been imagining it- we were so far apart- but it looked like her lips were curling upwards. "Vine Whip!"

I blanked. All I could do was stare dumbly at Undine, Amanda, and her _freaking carnivine_.

Amanda pointed at Undine. "Again!"

Undine snarled and leapt back, neatly avoiding the follow-up attack without my input. The buizel twisted its head to look back at me and gave a short bark- and then I shook myself from my catatonic state.

" _Sonicboom_!" I shouted. "Keep your distance!"

She responded instantly. A wave of compressed air tore past the approaching tendrils of the carnivine and hit it upside its comically wide head, and then Undine was right in front of me. She was fast.

"Ingrain, Growth, Sweet Scent," recited Amanda. The carnivine immediately rooted itself and began channelling its status moves. I gulped as its vines swelled up, extending their reach and attack power. Then the carnivine's giant mouth swung open and began releasing a pink cloud.

" _Sonicboom_! _Sonicboom_!" Undine might've been out of the figurative entei's mouth for now, but she wouldn't be for long. I needed to end this before the carnivine got large enough to remove distance and speed as factors.

Both attacks struck true- despite its type advantage, carnivine didn't have any way to block or counter a Sonic Boom attack. The artificial wind currents left by the attacks also helped to dissipate the pink cloud that was steadily growing around the carnivine's head.

Amanda must have noticed, because then she switched strategies. "Growth! Vine Whip! Growth! Vine Whip!" Her orders came out slower than mine, but at least she was precise.

It didn't matter, of course- Undine saw both attacks coming from miles away, and dodged them with ease.

"Sonicboom! And Swift," I added, remembering that the starry attack was ranged too.

This time, though, Undine coughed and put her paw to her throat after executing her orders. Scarcely believing what was happening, I sniffed the air- and caught a hint of a flowery aroma.

For the first time since the battle had started, I could hear the commentator, his voice deepened by the exploud he was talking through. "Buizel's not lookin' good! Dat Sweet Scent must've finally reached it! Looks like Sonicboom wasn' so clever after all!"

"Vine Whip."

"Quick Attack!" I screamed. Shaking off the perfume-induced fugue a little, Undine managed to launch herself forwards, but the sweeping green arm of the carnivine caught her mid-attack. With the force of so many Growths behind it, the Vine Whip hurled my buizel straight into the barriers just behind the edges of the pitch. Even if the attack hadn't knocked out Undine on its own, she'd _definitely_ been taken out of bounds.

And, just like that, I'd lost. My first ever tournament battle. Eliminated in the first round.

* * *

"Fire Fang!" I snarled. In the murky darkness ahead of me, sulphurous tongues of flame flared into life, briefly illuminating my boggy surroundings with its orange light until Fang launched himself at the hapless carnivine ahead of us. It made a noise halfway between a chitter and a whine, and then I heard the muffled _fwump_ of its collapse.

It was well past midnight, I was in the overgrown depths of Cayenne Lagoon, and I was still royally pissed off. A rapid series of wet slaps approached me- another gastrodon, attracted by the heat and the light of Fang's attack.

I stabbed my finger in the rough direction of the sound and said, "Giga Drain." Para, sitting beside me, obediently turned towards the invisible gastrodon and launched a volley of green orbs at it. Another whimper, one last mushy slap, and then silence reigned once more. Not even kricketot dared to chirp; Fang and Para had had a field day hunting down every single one of the annoying bugs.

Stupid Amanda. Stupid carnivine. Beating me in the _first round_ of a tournament in front of hundreds of people. My foot found a rock, half-buried in the muddy ground. I gave it a solid kick. It gave a whine and scampered off into the shadowy undergrowth. A roggenrola, or something.

My anger felt like a forest of fists inside my skull, pounding away at the bone for some kind of release. "Get me another carnivine!" I snapped at Fang. I heard him slither off. Moments later, I heard a scream. A carnivine scream, specifically. I'd gotten very familiar with that particular sound.

"HEY! Stop! Dolph, help him!"

A person. Had to hide. I ducked down, planting my hands squarely on the ground to keep me from pitching forwards, straight into the grimy silt that choked the floor of the lagoon shore. My hands felt cold and slimy. I sunk them further into the mud. The fists in my head abated for a moment, briefly appeased by this accomplishment, but then all too soon they were back at work. At this point, I just didn't care anymore.

Another scream. Not carnivine this time; human. Brilliant light exploded into existence, banishing the comforting shroud that the night had cast over my shoulders and blinding me momentarily. I let out an involuntary shout of my own.

"... Janet?" Oh god.

Fang came slithering back, looking stunned.

And then _she_ came stomping through the undergrowth after him, clutching a flashlight and flanked by an entourage of pokémon. My brain twisted in on itself; the fists were slamming into each other, reverberating under my skin.

"Janet! _There_ you are!" She- Amanda- turned the beam of light on me. "Oh no, sorry, you look- are you okay?"

"Do I _look_ okay to you?" I growled at her, squinting into the light.

"Oh my god, is that blood?" she babbled.

I followed her gaze. There was a streak of red on my forearm that I hadn't noticed before. "Huh."

"Look, let's get back to the Pokémon Centre," she said, stepping forwards to- to help me up or something.

Fang reared up and snapped at her arm, missing it by a hair's breadth. Behind me, Para let out a low, threatening growl of her own.

"No," I said, echoing the sentiments of my pokémon. Or maybe they were echoing my feelings. It didn't matter. "I don't need your _help_. Piss off."

For once, it seemed that she was silent because she didn't know what to say. Good! She didn't even need to be here. I was doing just fine on my own. Fang was really strong now, and so was Para, and I'd even given Caligula a go, before a shellos blindsided us with a Water Pulse.

"Go away," I repeated, in case she didn't get it.

Amanda shook her head resolutely. The pokémon with her- her larvitar, her corphish, her _carnivine_ \- copied her, and even crossed their arms.

"Go away," I insisted.

"No," she said again. Her expression softened, and suddenly it was like I was looking at another person entirely. "Come on," she said, edging closer towards me. Slowly, she extended her arm out to me again. The sound of her voice, the exhaustion that was beginning to creep into my bones- whatever it was, the pressure building up inside me seemed to lessen.

I glanced at her pokémon, aware of- but not understanding- the shift in emotions. They'd all averted their gazes, letting Amanda continue on her slow journey towards me without following her.

Fang hissed warily, still interposed between me and Amanda, but he made no move to attack her. With agonizing slowness, she placed her hand on his scaly head and, with all the care you'd afford a newborn eevee kit, pushed him out of the way. I sighed and closed my eyes. I could still feel the urge to do _something_ , even if it was duller now, pounding in my head. I reached to my belt and unclipped the second ball from the front.

"Return," I said under my breath. Dim red light filled my vision. Fang vanished from underneath Amanda's hand. I got up from my awkward crouch on the floor.

Amanda inhaled sharply. That had surprised her. There was no poker face now.

"Battle me." The words tumbled out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying. Para stood up on her stumpy root-legs and she stumbled in front of me, her frond-petal-things waving despite the still night air. She assumed a stance that I figured meant business.

Now that she'd lowered her flashlight, I couldn't really see Amanda's face, but I could imagine the expression she was making. Indignant, exasperated, resigned?

Eventually, the sharp sound of a sigh signalled her assent. "Dolph," she said. Exasperated, then. Her larvitar trudged forwards, hampered a little by the marshy terrain. If I thought pure ground-types like trapinch were heavy, a larvitar must be something else. She took three slow, measured steps back, and looked at me for my go-ahead.

"Turn off the flashlight," I said.

Amanda hesitated, obviously afraid of what might happen in the dark, but I wasn't going to concede this. It took a couple of minutes, but eventually she flicked the light off.

"Blindfight," I started. I began pacing. It was satisfying, feeling how every step I took reshaped the mud under my feet. "One on one. Battle until one is unable to fight. _No forfeits_."

The swish of hair on fabric. "- oh, um, yes," said Amanda, her voice floating out of the darkness ahead of me. I could almost see the outline of her silhouette, I thought.

"Start on three. Three... two... one!" I inhaled. " _BrineGigadrain_!" I stabbed my hand at where I knew the larvitar had gone- several metres left of where it had been when Amanda turned out the lights. The sound of Para firing off her attacks- music to my ears- and then the sound of the larvitar squealing and collapsing. I'd been right.

"HA!" I shouted. Amanda's flashlight flickered back to life, but that was fine- two supereffective hits from my lileep's strongest attacks were practically guaranteed to knock out _anything_ that Amanda was capable of training, at our current level. With something between a sigh and a snort, Amanda groped for the right ball at her waist and, upon finding it, withdrew her fallen teammate.

"Is that it?" Amanda said. "Can we go back to the Centre now?"

I looked back out at the silent, shadowy lagoon. Thought a little. My stomach growled, aggressively reminding me that I hadn't put something in it for more than twelve hours.

"Fine," I said. We withdrew our pokémon and set off, Amanda in the lead. I coughed into my fist to get her attention back for a second. "And, um, thanks. For coming to get me."

She just sighed again. "It's fine. I'm just glad I didn't find you getting mauled by an ekans again."


	13. Blacklight Pt 2

When we reached the Lagoon Gate- the main portal between Cayenne and the lagoon that dominated its west- it became obvious that something was wrong. The gate was a hive of activity, even though it was nearly two in the morning. Uniformed men and women were hurrying through it. I would recognise those brown slacks and durant-grey helmets anywhere: these were _soldiers_. Members of the Zan military.

"What the hell?" murmured Amanda. I'd almost forgotten about her.

"You didn't see any signs of this before you left?" I whispered to her.

She shook her head. "I was searching for you for about an hour before I found you," she said.

"What could've happened in an _hour_?"

A big hand clapped down on my shoulder from behind me. My heart leapt into my mouth and past my lips and I swivelled around, winding my fist up for a solid hit. Amanda looked equally rattled, though she stumbled backwards rather than going for a punch.

"Whoah!" said the woman behind us. "Calm down, I'm not gonna hurt you."

A soldier, dressed the same as the ones charging through the gate up ahead.

"Sorry, ma'am, but what the hell- heck's going on?" Amanda said.

"Can I have your I.D. first?" said the soldier. "You two'll be trainers, right?"

Mutely, we handed our Pokédexes to her. She held up her wrist to them and then, apparently satisfied, handed them both back. It was hard to make out anything in the darkness, but she must have had a wristband or something with scanning capabilities.

"Mhm," she said, apparently to herself. "Hard to imagine two girls like you being out at this hour unless you were trainers." She nodded.

"So... what's happening?" Amanda said again.

The soldier didn't bother with pleasantries. "We've initiated a full evacuation of Cayenne City and all neighbouring towns and villages in order to deal with a six-badge crisis."

" _What_ crisis?"

A flash of white-blue light, and then the resounding _crack_ of thunder not half a second later, gave us our answer.

"Zapdos," I said softly. The soldier nodded grimly. With that realisation, the stress and exhaustion seemed to melt away from my bones, to be replaced with an electrifying energy.

"Yep," confirmed the soldier.

"Now, I'd really better join the guys over there, so I'm going to call up one of the police officers on evacuation and they send over a jeep to bring you to one of the evac zones," said the soldier. "Can I trust you two to stay put until a cop arrives?"

Amanda nodded earnestly, and then they both turned to me. "Uh, yeah, sure," I said. "I'll stick around."

The soldier left, and then Amanda and I were alone again, standing in the dark on the roadside. Amanda clicked off her torch. "I'm saving the battery," she explained.

"Great," I said. I pulled out my Pokédex again and started going through my team's statistics again. Height, weight, vitals.

"Hm," said Amanda from right next to my ear. I repressed the urge to attack her with a swift headbutt. "You have no signal," she pointed out, unaware of how close she'd been to being dealt a skull-induced concussion. She consulted her own Pokédex. "Me neither."

"So? It's a Zapdos attack. Electricity, remember?" I said. "Stiffs probably took down the 'net towers themselves."

"Stiffs?" repeated Amanda.

"Like, soldiers," I said.

"I'm familiar with the term," Amanda informed me testily. "I just thought you might be more respectful towards the trainers who've selflessly taken on the duty of _protecting our country_."

Inexplicably, the feeling that I had just taken a step that I really shouldn't have entered my mind. "What?"

"Nobody ever spares a thought for them," she went on. "Everyone knows the names of the greats and the champions and the masters, but who can name a single soldier?"

"... Holden Charme?" I ventured.

Amanda didn't say anything for a while. "I'm going to speculate that he was a champion at some point, which is the only reason why you remember his name at all."

"Actually, he only got as far as Rican before he lost and had to give up on championhood," I said. Rican, of course, was the third member of Zan's Elite Four, a grass-type specialist whose signature pokémon was a giant venusaur. Even by venusaur standards, it was _huge_.

"Typical," muttered Amanda to herself. I wasn't sure if I was meant to hear that. "Whatever," she said, raising her voice back to a conversational volume. "It doesn't matter."

It occurred to me to wonder why she cared so much about soldiers at all. "Why do you even care?" I asked. "Are you thinking of joining the military? Because-"

"What- no!" Amanda made an expansive, incredulous gesture with her arms, the particulars of which were lost in the darkness. I only had the general motion to go by.

"Are your parents in the military?" I said.

Her response was a stunned, almost dismayed silence.

"Janet, I've never _met_ my parents," she said finally. "We're- you were in 11D, weren't you?"

"Uh, yeah," I said. "You weren't, though."

"Yes, I know. I was in 11 _C_. You know, the other girl's dormitory? In the building that we all lived in because _none_ of us have homes? Or families?"

Oh. _Oh_. "Oh," I said. "Right. The Trainer Act."

"Could you not have figured it out just by looking at my name?"

"Your... name?"

"Yes, that's what I just said," said Amanda. "Orphans get Anglean names like Amanda and Janet. Like they have in that show from Kalos, with the ledian."

This was news to me. "Anglean? What about, uh, people who aren't orphans?"

"They get _Zannese_ names," said Amanda. "Please tell me you remember the name of our freaking language."

I scowled, though it was invisible in the darkness. Her tone was getting too uppity for my tastes. "So what if I do? I'm going to become the best trainer in the world. I don't have time for _languages_."

"You know-" Her retort was lost in the roar of a car engine. Two circles of yellow light flew across the road and the bushes where we were standing, accompanied by the sound of tires screeching on tarmac. Our ride was here. Amanda flicked on her flashlight, transforming it from a pair of unblinking round eyes floating in front of us into a roofless, blocky car, driven by a man dressed in a collared orange T-shirt and a peaked cap.

"Get in, and be quick about it," snapped the man. The back doors of his car swung open in unison to admit Amanda and me. We clambered on without missing a beat. "Put your seatbelts on," he told us as he turned the car around. I did as he said, which was when I noticed the third passenger in the vehicle. It was a small pokémon, covered in fur that might have been ginger or auburn to begin with but was currently crusted over with blackish mud. To my untrained eye, it didn't look injured, but leather belts had been wrapped around its four limbs, effectively immobilizing it, and a muzzle had been placed on its snout. It glared up at me with two beady little eyes.

"Uh, what's this?" I asked, pointing at the unfriendly-looking pokémon.

"Teddiursa I picked up," said the officer tersely. "Zapdos makes pokémon go crazy. Wouldn't have stopped for it, but it was about to get killed by an ursaring. Probably its mother."

Amanda put her hand to her mouth. I contemplated the pokémon next to me. Now that I knew what to listen for, I could hear a sustained growl originating from the teddiursa's head.

"Pressure, right?" I said.

"Mm?"

"The ability that makes pokémon go crazy," I elaborated. "The one that Zapdos has."

Amanda shook her head. "It doesn't make them go _crazy_. It's more like... telegraphing the Zapdos' current emotional signature to all pokémon in the area."

"Which makes 'em go crazy," said the officer. " _Nothing_ wants to hear that a legendary's on the warpath."

As if to emphasize those ominous words, lightning forked through the sky in the distance once again, followed by the resounding rumble of thunder. It was far louder than any of the normal thunderstorms that I'd lived through.

Several droplets of water landed on my bare arms. I looked up and another one splashed onto my glasses. It had started raining. The officer swore and suddenly the car lurched forwards; he was speeding up to get out of the oncoming storm. I yelped as the car made a sharp turn, and then again when it turned back in the other direction a few seconds later. It was just my luck that we'd had to speed up just as the road turned into a meandering mess of curves.

Within minutes, the light drizzle had evolved into a heavy downpour. The path that the car's headlights had cut into the gloom was considerably shorter than before, but the officer paid it no mind and continued to accelerate. Feeling queasy (my exhaustion was catching up to me), I tried to console myself with the thought that he was probably a native who knew this road like the back of his hand.

"Doesn't this thing have a roof?" shouted Amanda.

"No!" shouted the officer back. "Now shut up! I'm-"

He gave the wheel a savage spin and Amanda and I screamed as my side of the car rose into the air- the wheels weren't even touching the ground.

That was when we crashed. There was a moment of blind, whirling terror as we spun off the road and into the abyssal darkness of the wild, and then snapped to a stop.

" _HRRK_ ," I grunted as my seatbelt dug into my chest and neck in an effort to keep me from flying through the car's windshield.

"Holy shit," said Amanda. "Is everyone okay?"

"Yeah," I managed to say, though it was difficult to breathe. Gingerly, I unclipped the seatbelt. It had served its purpose.

The officer gave us a guttural groan, barely audible through the drumming of the rain around us. That was a no. I threw open my door and took an unsteady step out of the car. It felt like we were on a slope. The car's lights were still on, giving me a little bit of light to work with, but besides a few inches of flooded, muddy tracks, everything was pitch black. I couldn't hear much, either, with the rain drowning out anything that wasn't spoken from right next to me.

Another weak circle of light appeared near me, illuminating Amanda and the bits of the car immediately surrounding her. That would be her flashlight again. When she turned it out of the car and into the open, the beam of light barely made it a metre into the rain, illuminating a lone, scraggly tree, before darkness swallowed it all up again. I looked up at the sky. Now that it was raining so hard, not even the moon or the stars were visible.

The officer groaned again, this time more clearly. Amanda swivelled her beam of light around to reveal him. As it roved through the car, it brought more and more detail to light. The back of his seat... his tousled head, lolling to the left, his cap nowhere to be seen... the cracked glass of the windshield...

And then, from out of the black wall of rain, something massive, lumbering down the slope towards us.

"Rrrr..." it rumbled. The officer hadn't been groaning at all.

A single, clawed foot slammed into the front of the car with a hideous clang, actually sinking into the metal. The sheer size of the foot, combined with the tan, rocky hide that covered it, meant that this could only be one thing.

"Rhydon," I said, as disbelieving as I was terrified. First Zapdos, then the rain, and now _this_?

Amanda reacted immediately, hurling the torch aside and then grabbing me by the arm. With a forceful tug, she directed me downhill, away from the rhydon mauling our ride. My heart pounding so hard that I could hear it, I followed her down the slope in a rush, skidding through rain and mud and brush without so much as a grunt. Only one thing was on my mind- _running_.

Eventually, though, we had to stop for breath. Clutching a stitch at my side, I gasped, "Stop!" I heard an immediate _whump_ in response; Amanda must have dropped to the floor or slumped against a tree or something. I wanted to do the same, but I needed to do something else first. I felt at the Pokéballs clipped on my belt. One... two...

"Holy... shit..." wheezed Amanda.

 _Three_. "Go, Para," I said. A brief flash of white light, and then I heard my lileep's trademark purr. I'd never been so happy to hear it in my life. "Listen," I said carefully, desperately trying to keep myself from slurring my words, "In a few moments, an angry pokémon will come down this hill. Use Brine and then Giga Drain on it, okay?" From my angry training expedition before, I knew that Para had no trouble seeing things at night; it was just a question of whether Para would be able to follow my clear orders.

With that out of the way, I reached out to my left and felt for a tree. After a few seconds of blind groping, my fingers hit soaked bark and I leaned into it. It held up under my weight, and I let out a sigh of relief. This was fine. Para had a huge advantage over rhydon. The rain didn't hurt either.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. The rhydon's thunderous footfalls as it charged after us.

"Here it comes," I whispered to my lileep. "Get ready..."

BOOM. BOOM.

"Wait," groaned Amanda. "Shouldn't we-"

BOOM.

"BRINEGIGADRAINBRINE!" I screamed.

Para flung out all three series of projectiles in rapid succession- in an instant, the footfalls stopped. Time seemed to freeze- I was caught between urges to holler like a madwoman and to collapse and never wake up again- and then it seemed to _teeter_ , somehow, like it was on the verge of collapsing too.

CRUNCH. That was the sound of the rhydon falling down.

CrsSshsshhhsHSssHSSHH. _That_ was... uh...

I felt it before I realised what it was. Crimson light blossomed in my head- biting pain raced up my leg- and I screamed as I was flung backwards by the force of a phantom collision. The dark rain around me blurred as I flew through the air. Another spike of fiery agony, this one in my upper back, and then I was lying on the muddy soil, gasping for air, feeling shuddering sobs trying to explode their way out of my chest. Terror gripped my being as I realised that I couldn't breathe, that I was going to die here, in the rain, cold and wet and burning hot, with no idea of what had killed me.

And then two hands dug their way underneath my back and tugged me upright, so that I was sitting up.

"Breathe!" someone shouted through the roiling storm of thoughts in my head.

I struggled to rein in my lungs- it felt like they were going to burst and collapse all at once. Somehow, I managed to slow my panicked gasping long enough that air began to work its tentative way back into my windpipe again.

"Ho-holy c-crap," I managed to cough once I felt like I was breathing properly again.

"JANET!" screamed someone. I almost had a heart attack then and there, but then I realised that it must have been Amanda. The sounds of frantic scampering over twigs and branches followed.

"What the- Pulsar, Flash," said the person who had told me to breathe, who I was now realising _wasn't_ Amanda. I winced and instinctively tried to shield my eyes, only to cry out when my back screamed in protest at the gross overuse of my arms.

"A little dimmer," muttered the person. The light stopped searing my retinas. "Can you guys see now?"

"Yeah," said Amanda uncertainly. Exhaustion hooded her eyes, and her skin looked deathly pale in the cold white light cast by the Flash attack. She raised a hand to her mouth and gasped again, like she had when she'd heard about the teddiursa. It took me a moment to realise that she was staring at me.

"Can you sit up on your own?" said the person behind me. I slumped forwards slightly, groaning as I felt the individual muscles in my back creak and shift their way into a less relaxed position.

"Yeah," I said eventually, when I no longer felt her supporting my back. God damn it. Something was definitely wrong back there.

The person came out from behind me. She- it sounded like a she- was dressed in full waterproof gear; a windbreaker, tracksuit pants, the whole works. Her face was doubly obscured- first by the hood of her jacket, pulled on over her hair and head, and second by a pair of really high-tech looking goggles. They cast a faint green glow over the top of her outfit.

"Tell me whenever it hurts," she said as she knelt by my side and began running her hands over my legs. When she got to the middle of my left thigh, the pressure seemed to multiply a thousandfold and I cried out. She relented for a moment and reached into her pocket. Out came a potion bottle- orange and yellow, meaning it was a Super Potion. She gave it a squeeze and aimed the spray at the point where the pain was the worst, near the top of my thigh. Then she brought it slowly down my leg, until she was nearly at my knee. She leaned in again to inspect it and made a _tsk_ noise.

"Wh-what's wrong?" I said.

"Potion's not working," she told me. "That means your leg's probably broken."

I felt my stomach plummet through the ground beneath me.

"I suppose it was this rhydon here that did it?" she said, pointing at something on my right.

Not quite sure what I was expecting, I turned to look at it directly. Sure enough, an unconscious rhydon was lying right next to me, streaked with mud and half-buried in the slope. A deep track had been cut in the slope behind it, leading back all the way up to a copse of trees that, I imagined, was where Amanda and I had taken our short breather.

"I tried to warn you," said Amanda miserably. "Your plan knocked out the rhydon, but it didn't stop it from falling towards us anyway."

"Oh," I said faintly. That had been a painful oversight.

"I tried to throw a Pokéball at it, catch it before it hit you, but I think I missed," she continued.

"Amanda, come down here. I'm going to have Pulsar stop using Flash," said the woman in the goggles.

Amanda and I fielded our questions simultaneously. "What?" "Why?"

"That light makes us conspicuous as all hell," said the woman. "As long as it's shining, we're at risk of getting blasted by Zapdos."

"And how do you know my name?" That was Amanda.

The woman seemed thrown by this for a couple of seconds, but then she clapped her hand on her forehead. "Oh, right, the goggles. It's me, Daria!"

"What? Why are you even out here?"

"It's a long story," she said. Presently, Amanda finally finished her precarious journey downhill, and Daria glanced skywards. "Lights out, Puls!"

The light flickered out and we were plunged into darkness again, besides the three lime green circles of Daria's goggles. I could make out the shadowy outline of one of her fingers, pointed at them. "Night vision," she explained.

"Are you here to fight Zapdos?" said Amanda quietly.

"Ultimately, yes," said Daria. "But right now my priority is getting you two back to the evacuation zone safely." A strangely moody silence descended over the three of us.

" _Errk_ ," I grunted, feeling the pain in my leg flare up again. It had been burning this whole time, but I could feel it growing hotter, like a fire gorging itself on my body.

Both Amanda and Daria seemed alarmed by this, and Daria pulled something else out of her pockets and offered it to me. "Painkillers. I'd really prefer to do a full check-up here, but time's working against us. We're going to have to leave soon."

"How?" said Amanda. "Our ride's busted." There was a sudden, mortified silence, as we remembered that there was still someone else who needed help. "Oh god the driver. The officer. The- oh my god!"

"Calm down," said Daria. The flash of a Pokéball, and something white appeared near where I'd first seen Amanda. The light died out before I could get a better look. "Maron, look for a man. He'll be..."

"In a jeep," supplied Amanda. "A police officer."

"Those things," said Daria. "Then come back here and wait for me, okay?"

An affirming bark floated out of the darkness, and then the focus was back on us. "Neither of you happen to have caught a flying-type by now, I presume?"

Both of us said no.

"Pulsar!" she called up to the sky again. "How's a little exercise sound?"

A pink blob of light, alone in the ocean of darkness up above, blinked on and off several times.

"What if we go out to sea? You won't have to deal with your own weight there."

The light blinked again.

"Alright," she said. "Here's the plan. We're going to carry Janet to the beach. There, Pulsar will lift her up with Psychic and bring her to the evacuation zone."

God damn it. Why was I always the one who needed help in these situations?

 _You_ were _the one who tried to tackle an unconscious rhydon_ , pointed out my treacherous thoughts.

"Shut up," I growled under my breath.

"Brace yourself," said Daria. "We're about to pick you up."

I gulped and tried to relax. "Okay," I said. "Ready."

In an instant, burning pain seized every fibre of my body. Fighting every inch of the way, I managed to clench my teeth together, and wound up releasing only a highly abridged, wordless version of the curses that crowded their way into my chest and throat. Slowly- _agonisingly_ slowly- Amanda and Daria trudged their way downhill, Daria in the lead with her night-vision goggles and Amanda gingerly trying to avoid jostling my injured- _broken_ \- leg.

There were a few stomach-wrenching moments when one of them slipped on the wet ground or a loose rock, and by stomach-wrenching I really meant nightmarishly painful, but eventually we finally made it to the beach, and Daria and Amanda gently lowered me to the mushy sand. By this point, I was pretty sure that the none of the water remaining on my face was rainwater, but there was no time to be embarrassed or even angry about it.

"Pulsar!" said Daria. Her pokémon, whatever it was, responded by enveloping me in a blue aura and lifting me up off the ground. Its mental grip kept my broken leg securely in position. I could almost hear the choir of chimecho singing its praises.

And then we were off, me floating gently in the air, pounded by the rain (but rapidly getting used to it), and Pulsar swimming invisibly in the murky ocean below me. I'd lost track of Daria and Amanda pretty much as soon as they'd put me down, but it didn't matter much- clearly, Pulsar was able to detect me, whatever it was. Partly because it was interesting, but mostly in order to take my mind off the pain gnawing at my left hip, I started speculating on Pulsar's species. It was pretty obviously a psychic type, and probably a water type two, judging by how at home it was in the water. That left a couple of possibilities; either slowbro or starmie.

It was probably a starmie, I concluded, feeling a small wave of satisfaction at having figured it out. The pink light I'd seen Daria talking to corresponded roughly to the image I had in my head of the pink gem at the centre of a starmie's body, and I was pretty sure slowbro couldn't levitate. They were too fat and slow-witted.

The sense of accomplishment was short-lived. As I was pondering the next thing to think about, the blue aura surrounding me turned white. Then I heard a thunderous crack- so loud that my whole body _trembled_ \- and then the aura vanished completely. Faintly, it occurred to me that I'd just been struck by lightning.

I barely had time to take a deep breath before I plunged into the black sea. The impact felt like driving red-hot nails into my spine and leg, and I screamed. Water immediately rushed into my mouth and nose and I cursed myself even as I vainly struggled to expel it.

Surface. I needed to surface. In pitch darkness, that was easier hysterically thought than done. I had no idea which direction was up- if I was still facing it, or if I'd been rolled around.

A stroke of luck found me, then; something cold and hard pressing against my stomach. I blindly reached out with my arms and found something smooth and thick. Clinging on to it for dear life, I waited for the chilly embrace of death.

 _PSHHH._

Instead, I found the chilly embrace of the open sky, and the fierce lashes of a hundred raindrops on every drenched inch of my exposed skin. I wasn't underwater anymore. Even though my eyes were stinging from all the saltwater still on my face, I forced them open in an effort to get my bearings. Nothing but different shades of darkness- the straight-edged black of the rain, and the inky waves of the ocean. But then, from underneath me, a glimmer of pink, which vanished and reappeared again, vanished and reappeared again. Fighting off the pain in my back, I lifted my right side up- and sure enough, that was the starmie's gem under my stomach.

"P-p-pulsar," I managed to say through the biting cold numbing my lips. "G-get -me to shore."

No response. Either it only took orders from its own trainer, or something had fried its circuits. Maybe the lightning bolt that had thrown me out of the sky. Still tightly gripping the starmie beneath me- it was quite literally my only lifeline for the moment- I reached to my belt one-handed and felt for my balls. Thankfully, they were still there. One, two...

My heart stopped beating. Three. Where was three? Where was _Para_?

An awful image entered my head- Para, battered and oozing blood, crushed beneath the behemoth body of the rhydon that had broken my leg, forgotten about in the heat of the moment and the need to get _me_ to safety. I fought back the tears that threatened to come- first things first.

Pokéball four was still where it was supposed to be, so I expanded it and released my buizel. "Undine," I started. "G-get us to shore." I couldn't see her in the darkness, nor could I hear her paddling or any response she might have made over the torrential sound of the rain, but in a moment I felt a wet paw tug at my collar and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Together, we headed to the shore.

The going was slow, at first. Waves kept crashing into us, and although the bouyancy of the starmie kept me from going under for longer than a couple of seconds, it occurred to me that each one that struck us pushed us back. We weren't making any headway- and I could only hold on for so long. Eventually, my arms would tire out... or I'd _black_ out.

That was when Undine started glowing. She was _evolving_. She didn't stop pulling for an instant, so I was able to witness firsthand the shift between a buizel and a floatzel. One second, we were barely managing to drift in the direction of Undine's pull- the next, we were _zooming_ through the ocean, kicking up a spray that forced me to squeeze my eyes shut and pray that it would be enough to get me to land.

It was.

On the sand, I released the starmie and immediately wrapped my arms around Undine, squeezing her for all I was worth. Words alone could not express the depths of my love for her in that moment. Once the adrenaline for that had worn off, I slumped back, without even the strength to cry out as my injuries flared up once more. Exhaustion had overtaken me... the kind that seeped into your bones until everything felt like a single, mercurial mass.

Gradually, I became aware of how cold it was. The ocean had been strangely warm, despite everything, but now that I was on land I was beginning to shiver. Undine had a solution for that too; she lay down on top of me, and I hissed through my teeth as the warmth of her body radiated through mine. Floatzel was rapidly making its way up the list of my favourite pokémon.

 _That_ thought reminded me of my other team members, which reminded me of Para, and I felt the tears start to well up. She was gone. I'd only had her for _two_ _days_ , and she was already _gone_. All because I couldn't handle a fucking loss, and because I went out alone at night, and because I couldn't think things through enough to get things _right_. It was my fault. My chest tightened suddenly, and then I became aware of a ghoulish moan- Undine, baying as I wept, as if she was mourning our departed teammate too.

"Janet? You okay?" shouted someone. "Oh, oh god. Pulsar!"

The familiar sound of a pokémon being recalled rang in my ears. I managed to work up the willpower to open my eyes- green circles floating in the air. It was Daria.

"I'm so sorry," she blurted when she saw that I was still conscious. "I- I didn't realise- the glow- I thought it- oh god."

 _Flumph_. She fell onto the ground next to me. "This is terrible," she said. I heard her fumbling with her stuff through the rain, and then the sound of a Pokéball opening again.

"Pulsar, are you okay?" I saw a series of blinks. "We're going to do this again, except this time we'll keep her near the surface of the water. Floatzel can take over if you get hit again, okay?"

More blinking. "Janet, did you get that?"

I nodded blearily. "Undine... follow me." She obediently slid off my chest and stomach and stood attentively at my side. The pale blue aura of Pulsar's Psychic wrapped itself around me again, and I was gently conducted over the sand until I was hanging in the air just above the ocean. Undine slipped into the ocean after me.

With the watchful eyes of both Daria and Undine shoring us up, we finally made it to the evacuation zone- soaked through, absolutely drained, but alive. Like everywhere else, the lights were out, but between Daria's night-vision and the enhanced senses of our pokémon, we found the entrance without any trouble.

"She's got a broken leg and is almost definitely in shock," said Daria by way of introduction. "Get her to a bed, and get a nurse to check on her soon."

As I was lifted up with a stretcher, all thoughts of Para and rhydon and starmie and Daria slunk out of my mind. For the time being, I was safe.

I slept like a rock.


	14. Interlude 2: Three Words

14 / 08 / 2000 00:30

 _Vrm_. The automatic doors of the Pokémon slid open to admit another round of trainers. Amanda Black, the recent winner of the season's first Rookie Rumble, looked up from her game of Virtual Solitaire. She spared the newcomers a brief glance from her spot in the lobby, but there were no blondes. She sighed. The guilt fizzling in her stomach, keeping her from just going to bed, was finally starting to peter out. Even if she didn't have plans for tomorrow, she knew the value of a good night's sleep, and the cost that came with missing out on too many. The fact that she _did_ have plans- _trainer_ plans- made her all the more anxious.

Just where the hell was Janet Prosper?

Someone tall plonked herself in the seat opposite Amanda, focusing intently their Pokédex. It was a little hard to tell, but Amanda thought they might be female. Her mane of bright red hair was drawn over the front of her shoulders, obscuring her face in a way that Amanda suspected was intentional. Because of the way the woman's hair was arranged, and the way that she was holding her phone right up to her nose, it took Amanda a while to recognise her- in fact, she only finally made the connection when the nurse called for a trainer with a Ninetales.

"Daria?" said Amanda, when the woman returned from picking up a solitary Pokéball from the counter and went back to fiddling with her Pokédex. The woman, who was indeed Daria, gave a start and stared frozenly at Amanda. She looked surprisingly guilty, like a teddiursa who'd been caught with the honey.

"H-hey," she finally said back, smiling weakly. "How's things?"

"Not going great," Amanda grumbled. Without any further prompting, she launched into a detailed explanation of the night's events, starting from the beginning of the Rookie Rumble. "So, really, even though it was all down to me being more skilled and, I guess, _prescient_ than her, I still feel kind of guilty? Janet's... weird, and I don't want to ruin anything for her. Plus there's no way that staying up _this_ late is healthy."

Daria inhaled deeply. "Prescient's a good word." She stole a nervous glance at her Pokédex screen. "Let's see... how prescient are you feeling right now?"

"A little?" said Amanda uncertainly, biting her lip. She'd been hoping for some kind of advice, not... this.

"Where would Janet go, if not the Pokémon Centre? What would she do? What's her thing?"

Winners, losers. Janet was competitive. "She's... competitive?"

"Carnivine, right? Where did you catch that?" said Daria, knowing full well what the answer to that question was.

"Cayenne Lagoon," said Amanda, realisation dawning on her like the Xatu of Archimedes. "That's the only place you can find carnivine here. That's where she's been, battling carnivine." _And it's where she'll stay, until either her or her pok_ _é_ _mon collapse_ , she added silently.

Daria furtively looked around the Pokémon Centre and leaned forward until she was practically doubled over in her seat. "Listen, I'm not supposed to know this yet, but something bad is about to happen here. Grab Prosper and get back to this Centre A.S.A.P, got it?"

Amanda hesitated. "'Something bad'?" she echoed. The phrase wasn't very specific, and it didn't sound very trustworthy.

"Yes," said Daria impatiently. "Look, it's in both of our best interests that I'm as vague as possible about this. Plausible deniability. They don't treat 'gut instincts' as admissible evidence in court. Just trust me when I say that it's not something you want to leave your friend in."

"Court?" sputtered Amanda, drawing several quizzical looks from trainers scattered around the lobby.

"Keep it down!" hissed Daria.

They waited for the other trainers to lose interest. "Sorry. But... in _court_?"

Daria nodded. "That's what's on the line here, potentially. Just don't mention any of this to anyone. Ever. And you'll be fine."

"Okay," said Amanda. This all sounded highly suspect, but Daria _had_ helped her out in Marma Forest, when they'd last met. She resolved to give her the benefit of the doubt. If there was no big catastrophe, then she'd remember that the next time Daria gave her a cryptic warning- like the boy who cried houndoom. And if there _was_... then she'd be glad she listened. "I'd better go, then, right?"

"Yeah. And you'd better hurry."

* * *

14 / 08 / 2000 08:30

"Eurgh," groaned Cara as she idly scraped a teaspoon in circles along the bottom of her long-finished cup of black coffee. "What a frickin' week." She could just feel the bags under her eyes. Call it a woman's intuition.

"No kidding," said Archer, looking about as exhausted as Cara felt. "The fiasco at Eden, the bomb threat at Allspice... and then of _course_ Zapdos happens to show up at the one place I'm still obligated to go, even with the lockdown on Eden..."

A steaming cup of coffee of his own in hand, he made as if to seat himself opposite Cara, but she shook her head emphatically and patted the seat next to her. "Your hair... hurts my eyes," she said by way of explanation, indicating his bright purple locks.

"Oh, sorry," said Archer. "It was awfully presumptuous of me to think that I'd be allowed to sit where I wanted in my own god damn kitchen." (He took the seat that she'd indicated anyway.) "Speaking of which," he continued, "I don't think you ever explained why you came along with me instead of, you know, going back to your _own_ Gym."

"Ha," snorted Cara. "Is _that_ your big question?" She lifted her mug and attempted to take a deep sip, only to be reminded that it was still empty. Her recovery from that little misadventure took a bit longer than it should've. "Well, you can thank Her Royal Champion-ness for that. She wants me up here to start hunting down the assholes who ran off with, I quote, our 'stupid project'."

"You mean _your_ stupid project," Archer corrected her.

Cara waved her hand dismissively. It was the hand with the mug in it. The teaspoon arced through the air almost gracefully, followed by a faint trail of the last cold dregs of Cara's coffee, and landed with a clatter on the red linoleum of Archer's lovingly maintained kitchen table. He winced- he'd _just_ given it a coat of Bluklight Shine- but she paid him no mind.

"I mean, if you _don't_ want to be remembered as part of the team of scientists who saved the Zan region, be my guest!" Cara said. "That just means more credit for me!"

Archer squinted at her for a while. "You're not on any team of scientists either," he said.

"Okay, yes, but-"

"Do you even know what they were doing in there?"

"Maybe-"

"And didn't we just, you know, _lose_ our team of scientists?"

Cara pincered one of his earlobes between two exquisitely manicured fingernails and began pressing them together. "Shut up and _listen_ up. We didn't _lose_ any scientists; they were stolen. And I'm going to get them back if it _kills_ someone."

Archer yanked his head out of her grasp and got to his feet, massaging the side of his head with a look of pure chagrin. "God, I can't even sit down in my own kitchen with you around," he muttered.

"What was that?" said Cara dangerously.

"Let's just hope that you _can_ get them back," Archer said. "'Saving the region' only sounds good when you actually manage it."

"That's definitely not what you just said, but that's fine," Cara declared. "Your place is pissing me off anyway. And what does a lady have to do to get some service around here?"

Archer's willpower, never the most reliable tool at his disposal, flagged a little at that. "Is that what that was?" he asked, picking up the fallen teaspoon and giving it a little shake.

Cara sniffed. "I can't _believe_ I'm stuck here until I figure everything out."

"That makes two of us," said Archer.

His guest gave him a dirty look, but ultimately practicality won out over vanity. "Enough with your boneheaded sniping. Let's talk strategy."

Archer rolled his eyes. "What is there to talk about?"

"The guys in black," said Cara. "They had some heavy hitters. Diverse types, all trained to competitive levels."

"So?"

" _So_ ," Cara started testily, "they _must_ have invested significant time and resources into these pokémon. We need to start tracking high-level trainers who have any one of the species that we saw back then, and _especially_ the ones who have more than one."

"And what if these mystery trainers don't go around using the pokémon that they use to break in to top-secret government facilities for every little thing? What if these guys are, I dunno, Sonese saboteurs?"

Cara groaned and massaged her temples. "It's bad enough when you're an idiot, but I _hate_ it when you're right."

It had been a long week. It was going to be an even longer day.

* * *

14 / 08 / 2000 16:30

The afternoon saw two brightly lit figures standing together on the shore of Enger's Lake, staring vacantly into its silver-blue depths. Though the water was crystal clear near where their bare feet were, revealing a bed of fine white sand and sleek black pebbles, further out from the shore the water seemed to shift from window to mirror, until the sun's glare seemed to pour out of the centre of the lake itself.

"It's so _sunny_ ," said the taller of the two figures. She was dressed in a T-shirt and breeches, both printed with the same cheap floral design. A straw hat was perched on her unruly mop of auburn hair, almost managing to hide the lines of black that were beginning to streak her hair. Completing the holidaymaker look was a pair of tacky star-shaped shades, their lime green arms snugly tucked into the nest of hair roughly where her ears should be.

"It's midsummer," observed her friend. Short and stocky, he looked oddly uncomfortable in his own summer-wear. Sweat glistened on his brow. There were lines written into his face that said that it had settled on its current stoic expression some years ago and hadn't changed for a moment since. _His_ hair was neatly groomed, as curtly cut as a soldier's.

She gave him a light punch on the shoulder. "You're such a lame-o, you know?" Some distance away from them, a slowpoke waded its ponderous way into the water. Soft ripples radiated out from where its supple pink skin touched the water. For a moment, the illusion that the lake was a mirror was broken.

"What I _meant_ to say was that it's not very fitting," she continued, ignoring the slowpoke. After spending a week here, she had caught a couple of her own. "Doing this cloak-and-dagger stuff out in the open, talking about it in such a, a peaceful place, y'know?"

"Careful," said the man. He touched the side of his nose. "You never know who's listening."

The girl sighed. "It's just us, Liph. You, me, and-"

An explosive spray of mist swept over the two of them. The man was almost bowled over; the girl's hat was knocked into the air, but she caught it and stuck it back on her head before it could fly too far away. Looming in the lake, coiled serenely on its sandy floor, was a titanic beige pokémon. Besides the faint waving of its fan-like tail, and the multicoloured glimmer of the sun's rays as they ran across the periwinkle pink and blue of the scales that adorned this tail, the pokémon was absolutely still. Not even the barest hint of a ripple in the water betrayed its presence. Like an arbok sunning itself in the morning, it affixed the trainers in front of it with a silent, almost knowing gaze.

A shadow of a person, covered from head to toe in black, emerged from the water behind the unmoving milotic, water sliding off their body in waves. This would be its trainer. She tilted her head towards the two trainers on the shore in greeting. Her face was hidden behind her helmet's visor. If a poker face were a closed book, the remorseless black of her visor was like bolting the covers together and dropping the thing into Enger's Lake.

"Servage. Liphias." The helmet messed with her speech, turning it into a synthetic meld of all kinds of other voices- making her voice as unidentifiable as her face. The girl and the man shrugged their own hellos at her. She clambered on to the segment of her pokémon directly obstructing her path to the shore. Her milotic turned vaguely towards her and lowed softly. "Well?"

"We've executed our mission successfully and are prepared to withdraw at your convenience, Princess," said the man, Liphias, bowing his head respectfully.

"Don't call me that," she said immediately.

"Nobody in Allspice suspects our involvement at all," he continued, giving her no sign that he'd heard her.

"And the fake bomb?"

The girl, Servage, gave her a nonchalant nod. "Left it behind, all dismantled-like."

"Excellent," said the masked trainer. She hesitated for a moment. "I know what you're... thinking."

Liphias and Servage exchanged glances. "Sorry?"

"This plan. It's too... complicated. There are too many moving parts to it."

"Never crossed my mind," Servage said immediately. "By the way, how come you two get to have these cool codenames and I don't? Princess, Liphias, _Servage_? That's not very good villainy, if I do say so myself."

"You have asked me this question before," said the trainer.

"And as I keep telling you, Liphias is my _given name_ ," added Liphias. "Not a codename."

The trainer nodded grimly. "Princess is not a 'cool codename' either."

"What if you guys call me... The Hunter?" Servage splayed her hands and wiggled them a little for effect. "Yeah? No?"

"No," said Liphias.

"Definitely not," agreed the masked trainer.

"You guys suck," pouted Servage.


End file.
